Expectavi
by Ranchoth
Summary: "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." The third installment of the "Spindoctor" tale...and the beginning of true horror.
1. No Angel to Be, I Turn the Sky

**Expectavi**

Chapter 1: "No Angel to be, I turn the sky..."

* * *

><p>"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure."<p>

—Marianne Williamson

"Great liars are also great magicians"

—Adolf Hitler

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

_December 30th, 2009 4:08 p.m., CST_

"...thus, in many ways, 'Plan Stalking Horse', and it's public cover, were the doppelganger for the Tet Offensive. While the objective of luring in and provoking entrenched Islamicist forces to attack, exposing themselves to annihilation and "bleeding them white"—to coin a phrase—was arguably a success...largely because of it's _intrinsically necessary _cover, it was criticized as failure and folly from before it even began. Which brings us back to our next point—"Daria paused to tap the "blackboard" with her stylus, cueing a Powerpoint event "—the value of _history's_ _perception_ of victory or failure in war and statescraft..."

It was more her experience as a student than her spotty career as a teacher that had taught Daria Morgendorffer how to "read" a classroom.

There were, she'd found, only a few basic types of students to be found, in varying proportions, in a class...

"Now, this seems obvious...but in fact, we've begun to step beyond the bounds of simple agitprop;

"...Guevara said 'let the world change you, and you can change the world.' However, I find it more accurate—and more apt to this field—to say that one must be _mindful_ of the world, of the _zeitgeist_, in order to change it. After all, as Heisenberg & McLuhan teach us, how the world perceives a thing can affect _it_ as much as the thing can affect the world. "

The most "visible" types—the clowns, the bullies, the struggling morons—were, of course, obvious almost to the point of caricature. Aside from any entertainment value, they'd never especially interested Daria—no, the subtler breeds of student were what piqued her curiosity...

"I'll reiterate why this is important. Just as the mariner is mindful of the weather before starting out on a voyage—he must know how to work with, around, and through the tempest to reach port, but if at _all_ possible, he doesn't let the weather determine _where_ he goes. Strategy and agitprop are, at their heart, the science of extending one's will onto others. The methods of execution may vary, but if you fail to achieve this central tenet—you are jetsam in history's wake. "

There was the dull, grey bulk of the majority—unremarkable kids politely following the lesson along, except for a fleeting distraction or fit of special boredom.

Then, there were the perpetually bored students—as a group, split roughly in half (half at best, really. And then mostly at the university level) between those who'd didn't have the heart or the glial cells to do more than coast through the classes, and the quiet prodigies who merely passed the time till they were allowed to plow through the mandatory paperwork to show that they already understood the material.

But then there were the few—she'd never seen more than half a dozen at once, and never that many before leaving secondary school—who were a different breed entirely. Scribbling or typing notes in a frenzy, or staring transfixed at the instructor, peppered only with the occasional nod, like they were accepting a _wahy._

Now, back to how this concerns us—in the _practical application of the principles of sociostrategy_. _Why_ the principle operates delves the fields of 'Jungian Memetics' and so-called 'Fractal Destiny' theories..."she tapped the stylus again, painting the screen with a dense forest of diagrams, many hauntingly beautiful, "...but for the moment, let's disregard the quanta and demiurge talk, and simply say that any society's perceptions of the world, it's schema in the _zeitgeist,_ tend to form in a quantifiable pattern. And any legitimate pattern can be analyzed, and to at least some extent predicted. Psychohistorical patterns are no exception. "

It was an attitude of fascination, of hunger, of intellectual longing...no, that wasn't the right word.

It was mental _lust._

And damned if not every single officer she could see in her auditorium didn't have that look on their face.

"Now, fans of Asimov may be disappointed, but this doesn't mean we can predict the future in crystal clarity—think of it more like meteorology; a weatherman can more-or-less predict the course of a storm, or general trends in global climate for a century, but simple chaos principles make it impossible to judge, say, the first foggy day in Denver, Colorado, in August 2059..."

Out of the corner of her eye, Daria caught a blinking light from the entrance of the classroom. Craning her head almost imperceptibly, she brought a lens to bear on the source, wrenching the silhouetted figure in the doorway to focus.

Her assistant, Fred, took his hand away from the hallway light switch to make a "hang loose" sign against his head, followed by a rather stabbed thumbs up.

"Gentlemen, it's been a long day, and we all have things to do...what's saw we wrap the introduction up next week?"

"Right then...I'd like you to read the Preface and Part One of Liang and Xiangsui..." she traced a finger over the notes on her lectern. "...additional reading assignment is _Industrial Society_, passages 6 through 37, and Wells' _Terror; _pages 23 to 24, and book two, chapter one, section one." She glanced back up, and crooked her right forearm, at the elbow, palm flat.

"...Hail Cobra."

A sea of fists leapt into the air of the classroom, accompanied with a collective roar.

"_CO-BRAAAA!_"

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

The bare walls of the base's main corridor shouted back peals of laughter, echoing from the screening room's half open door. As she passed it, Spindoctor noted the dry-erase marque read **_Today's Feature: Cannibal Holocaust ("Jungle Jollies" cut)!_** Daria smiled, grimly. She _knew_ that one would be a hit with the rank.

Fred's page had summoned Daria to the top floor offices of the Extensive Enterprises skyscraper that roofed the training base. Daria ran her keycard at the vestibule to the executive elevator that would bypass the building's sky lobbies—it saved her from having to change out of her uniform to pass through the "respectable" business levels.

She felt her feet leaden as the car began the surge skyward. She took the moment to spot-check before her appearance for "The Boys." Nervous habit, really—her epaulets and medal bar were just a straight as they always were. And the patch of hair next to her bangs had come in again quite nicely.

Presently, the nixie lights over the doors flashed _1-5-0_, and the car opened. The Crimson Guardsman at the entrance must have been expecting her. "'Afternoon, sir" he said, waving towards the executive suite, "The commanders will see you now."

"_Danke,_" she murmured, almost inaudible over the hollow echo of her bootsteps as she clomped across the marble foyer. The door to the main office suite was a grand imposing thing, cast in antiqued brass, but engraved, like so many other of the base's surfaces, with a familiar stylized snake's head.

She flashed her keycard at the security probe before it had finished extending from the ceiling, and repeated her codename. She probably could have said anything to pass the voiceprint check—and as usual, fought off the urge to tell it to go to blazes.

In any case, the probe gave an approving _beep,_ and a moment later, the great door slid open with an electric purr.

Inside the room, someone spoke "Ah! Do come in..."

A second voice picked up as the other cut off, "—Director Spindoctor. Punctual—"

"_—As always."_ finished both voices, as one.

Daria blinked against the light as she stepped inside—it was late in the day, and the suite had a blindingly clear view of the sunset over the Chicago skyline. Brilliant enough, in fact, that it practically silhouetted the two men within, as in perfect unison, each man broke from the handless _sirsasana_ pose he'd held on his desktop, executed a flawless backflip, and landed squarely in the seat of his office chair without a sound of effort.

Daria remained impassive. It _was_ impressive—the first twenty times she'd seen it.

"Sirs," she opened, with a formal nod. "If this is about that...um, _unseemly_ rumor thats been going around, I want to assure you that my department had _nothing_ to do with it, but I've already begun taking _full_ measures to quash—"

An echoing, unnerving chuckle floated across the office, cutting Spindoctor off. The interruption would have miffed her, if the laughter hadn't been so transparently nervous.

"Un—"

"—fortunately, our..."

"..organization requires a different set of your skills, director."

Thinking back, much later, Daria sometimes liked to imagine that her hackles raised at that last moment. It wasn't true, of course.

One of the twins keyed a panel on the desk, clouding the suite's smart glass and suitably dimming the room enough to showcase the hologram that flickered into life, dead center between Daria and her superiors.

"At 08:36 this morning..."

"...Signals intelligence detected a..."

"...Cobra-type radio signal here, in..."

"...the mountains of central Colorado."

The hologram, a masterwork of optical science, even if the perspective (as usual) was slightly "off," dutifully skinned over a green wireframe representation of a hunk of the Colorado rockies...she guessed. The unfamiliar contours looked about as random as anything else—the elaborate display was really pretty pointless.

It did, however, have a very nice circled area marked with "_APPROXIMATE SOURCE OF SIGNAL,"_ and a few lines of timestamped latitude and longitude coordinates, so apparently it proved they were getting their money's worth.

"_Intelligence..."_

"...analysis believes it to be..."

"...that of a transport flight pod lost"

"...in the area over a decade ago."

The map display dimmed, overlayed with a technical model of...well, _some_ kind of machine. To her, it looked not a little like a shuttlecock. After it had died, and been gnawed by rats.

"A bit long after curfew to phone home, isn't it?" Daria asked, pushing aside her inner technical writer.

"Indeed, astute..."

"...observation, Spindoctor."

"However, given the..."

"...location and altitude of the..."

"...transmission site, we believe..."

"...that the pod had crashed, buried itself..."

"...under the snowline, and only recently become uncovered. Likely by an..."

"...avalanche, or a seismic event."

Leaning towards the projection, Daria _hmmmed_ in reply as she tapped the bridge of her glasses a smidgen up her nose. Her mind had already started mulling of the situation...

_Buried object...mountainous area—geology. USGS survey team? Scratch it—nothing so urgent to warrant the Feds, on short notice, this close to the holidays. Not without suspicion. Save military—too obvious. Probably too risky. Stick with the science angle...same problem as Feds...what kind of scientists would...students! Grad work. Or obsessed geeks. Covers the rush, covers odd behavior. Absolutely imperial..._

Her semiconscious cheerfully tearing into the matter, Spindoctor nodded. "I don't see any problems on my end, sirs," she said, adding a frown, "...and while I, of course, _do_ recognize the need for security, I feel I have to note that's it's generally more efficient for me to deliver cover stories through the network..." she eyed the garish hologram, again. "...after all, there'd be no _sense_ in building a 'paperless office' if nobody _used—_"

The Guard Commanders glanced at each other. "I'm afraid you..." "...misunderstand your role in the mission, " "...director." The one on the left tripped another desk button, and a pedestal sprouted out of the floor tiles with a hum. The top of the table-high new surface dilated, exposing a fresh, important looking little _dossier_ file on top of a light panel.

Daria briefly wondered if that was the only thing that button did, as she stepped forward to take the file, stealthily avoiding the spot on the floor where she knew the trapdoor was hidden.

"As you can can see..."

"...on page three, if you please." At the twin's prodding, Daria obligingly flipped the folder open without even reading the cover...

...and her heart stopped. As soon as she saw the mission roster.

Terror, bewilderment, and several dozen questions started screaming in Daria's skull as the Commanders spoke again

"You, Spindoctor, are to take command of the..."

"...expedition to locate the crash site, and recover..."

"...from the wreckage any and all surviving..."

"...biological warfare units.

At the last phrase, all of Spindoctor's questions crystalized into a chillingly solid explanation. Damnably confirmed when she checked the "mission objectives" section of her handout.

"'_Bio warfare units_'..." she barely murmured the words out. "And that's why you want _me_...because of what happened in onboard—because of the _zo_—"

"Your performance in the..."

"...unpleasantness this last June was..."

"..._exemplary,_ Spindoctor!"

"...Absolutely superb!"

"An astounding demonstration—"

"—of the kind of skill needed in such a scenario!"

"...and a _different_ kind of 'unpleasantness' entirely than..._this_. A...'whole different _animal_.'" Daria answered, grimacing.

"True enough, but..."

"...none the less, an acceptable analog,"

"...by reckoning of..."

"..._intelligence_."The echoing of that last sentence rang like a knell, with a beat.

"By the same token, it means narrowing..."

"...down officers with an acceptable command experience..."

"...for _this_ mission excepts all..."

"...but the _one_ officer who has commanded such an experience..."

"...with exception. "

She wasn't amused. "Meaning no one _else_ at my _cotillion_ is going to know what they're in for?" _Either?_

"Not quite, director. Though..."

"...unfortunately, the pool of qualified specialists _'intel'..._"

"...could find for this _particular_ field runs rather shallow. Both in numbers,"

"..._and personal reliability."_

Which meant, Daria surmised, that the only technical advisors they could dig up were two quacks, some twitchy maniac, and an escaped Nazi. Totaling three persons, counting the ones only _presumed_ dead.

"Your _travel_ arrangements have been..."

"...arranged—as you can see. "The one on the right said, gesturing towards her folder.

"...We shan't keep you with the details."

Spindoctor paused, then just nodded, slow. What was there to say?

"If you will pardon me, sirs..." She clapped the folder shut, noticing for the first time the cover text: **_Operation: LOVING OLGA_**. Very respectably blase.

As she turned to leave, one of the voices tutted;

"Ah, one moment, director, if you wouldn't mind?"

Daria hid the cheek spasm pretty well, she thought. "Yes, commanders?"

"Concerning another matter...I understand your"

"...term of commission is almost ended..._n'est-ce pas_?"

Well _that_ was unexpected, she'd give 'em that. "That's right...this May." The 6th. Thursday. She'd checked, a long while back...a _very_ long while back, come to think of it.

"At the risk of prying, we _do_ hope you've given good consideration into 'reupping'..."

"...in our organization. _Some_ of us would"

_"...hate to lose you."_

_That_ was it? They drop a bloody bomb on her, then inquire about her career plans? If "Wint and Kidd" weren't _joking_...she narrowed her eyes at the commanders, slyly. Took in their features.

_No_...Daria, after everything, _still_ wouldn't trust herself completely at gauging the mind behind a good poker face.

But with the clumsy, transparent scheming that passed for conspiracy around Cobra, she could afford to have loose tolerances.

And at that, there wasn't a trace of a veiled threat on the twins' faces. That actually _was_ concern they expressed...but mixed, half buried with something else. She could see it, just, in their eyes. She knew it well.

The haunt of quiet desperation.

That was all Spindoctor could get. "I'll...keep considering it. Sirs." She took her leave, then, wordlessly, as the suite door opened ahead of her. What more was there to say?

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

_"Wenn ich Englisch sprechen konnte, konnte ich in England erobern Ein Jahr."_

The words carved into the gold skin of Jo the Skull disappeared under draped fabric before the lights in Daria's office flared up. She really had little against the grisly old relic, but he made too fine a coatrack.

Her lair in Gehenna was a windowless affair in the brutalist mold. Half a dozen different shades of rust-colored metal made the room's every surface, to proportions that subtly gave the impression of being more suited to a minor giant, and twin half-circle tracks of glazed lights facing off from the ceiling and floor provided the sole significant illumination.

In all, it seemed less like a workplace than a gallery, or a crypt.

But to Daria, at least, it was home. Her own, cozy little cave of steel. Home.

She padded across the room, slipping over the four inch incline that raised her desk bevel over the floor. A fresh pressed commando sweater was waiting in the seat of her office chair—itself a tall, vaguely gigeresque thing that more than resembled an imploded ribcage made of cedar, but that did wonders for her back. She pulled the sweater on as she plopped into her seat, and the wooden segments clattered happily under her weight.

She paused a moment, sagging. She pushed her glasses up over her brow. As she let her head rest on her ungloved hand, she could actually take time to notice the calloused _pense_ marks on her nose, as her free hand drummed her workstation's passcode on the desk control panel.

The symphonic _thrum_ from the desk speakers, followed by the crackley jabber of the hard drive access told her it worked—_a huge surprise, really_—but Daria didn't bother opening her eyes again until she heard the overhead projector flicker on.

She blinked, a second, against the light. The modest flatpanel screen that had raised from her desk only cast a muted glow. The real glare was from the image burning over the threshold across the room.

The crude folk-art of moldering bones from her personal art collection in it's usual cycle. Indeed, she found herself quietly admiring it as she brought up the BIOK mail client and rapidly pecked out a memo on her stenotype.

Presently she finished, just as the image on the wall faded from a from an ugly picture of a human to a scene of human ugliness—part three of the _Stages of Cruelty_ woodcut, if she thought right.

That was it, then...just a matter of waiting now. She'd almost certainly get a reply to her message before she had to leave for Colorado. Time enough to prepare...

Almost mechanically, she tapped yet another pattern onto a garden of keys hidden in the shadow of her desk alcove. No fancy lights of bells rewarded her, just a muffled _click_ and a puff of air as the drawer unlocked. She slid it open, heard the patch of black wax crack off and fall on her boot.

The contents were undisturbed, and just as generally unremarkable—papers, stamps, petty cash...and a box.

It was Snakewood. Sleak, every angle polished away, even the hinges to the lid concealed. It was marred by only a single element; a gleaming, red disc the size of an old half dollar, inset on top.

Absently, Daria ran her fingertips across it—ochre-red enamel, inlayed with black lacquer, and a few sprigs of silver, centered around a tiny profile of a _Galea_ helmet...

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

_Somewhere south of the Himalayas_

_Six Months Ago_

"...all right, we may _now_ go to active radar," came the insufferable man's voice over Daria's headset. Followed shortly by a soundless rumble from behind—her own ear protection and the shriek of the Rattler's two live engines muted the noise of the dorsal turret's traverse very nicely. "...six o'clock is clear."

"Copy," Spindoctor replied, tersely. It was yet another thing she "liked" about this trip—not only was her flight instructor not actually sharing the cockpit—and, more importantly, the backup flight controls—with her, but now he wasn't even looking in the same direction she was.

She sighed. At least it meant she didn't have to put up with the damned Rammstein collection he was always playing.

The Rattler's backseat driver's intercom crackled again; " haven't heart radar status, yet," Wild Weasel snapped.

_Yes, mom, _Daria thought, fingers playing over a control panel. "RWR is clear"—no one was "painting" or locking onto the fighter with active radar. Considering how far they were out in the boonies, this was hardly news. But there was no need to get a SAM up the rear just from being careless. She automatically adjusted the tuning knob next to the radar monitor to screen out the obvious ground clutter from the readout. She ended up blanking it before confirming that the omimnous wedge that appeared onscreen wasn't the shadow of a mountain.

"...contact. Bearing 315°. heading 315°, range...20 miles" They were directly astern of their target, closing. _Not bad at freakin' all._

She glanced up, out the canopy window. This proved pointless; with the fast approaching twilight in the misty gray rolling off the mountains, visibility was far less than the radar range.

She resisted the impulse to ratchet up the throttle and close the distance to target—it would have been a rookie mistake. Haste makes waste, slow and steady...

The screen shifted, numbers changed. "Range, 14 miles..." Her head twiched back up, birdlike, to catch the view through the heads-up display through her glasses. Still nothing.

She repeated the process half a dozen times more—radar check, visual check, nothing. Her tension rose...this had to be taking too long. Had she made—no, she _had_ to have screwed it up, somehow. She must have locked onto a cloud or something...the track was too perfect. _DAMNIT! You were _depending_ on this, you..._

She almost missed it...a little spot had bloomed in the haze dead ahead, a flurry of shadows whirling above a dark keel.

It was growing, at that...and too slowly to be part of the scenery passing below.

"Visual contact," she heard herself say, mouth strangely dry. "Range, 10 miles." The "target"—that was underdescriptive to the Nth—resolved itself as the distance closed; a _troika_ of wheeling rotorblades, circling silently through a few acres of air, slung above a crux of metal half a mile long, studded with the trappings of a nightmarish power planet...and a dull red roundel over the skin of an enormous rudder. There it was...there _she_ was.

CS _Argent Bifid._

The Monster loomed over the countryside like an iron cloud. Only the dance of it's shadow across the hills below belayed the incredible: the Beast was still _moving._

The intercom cracked again; "That's close enough; transition to VTOL."

Spindoctor automatically checked the fuel handle for engine #3—unnecessary, as it had been left off for cruising, but a standard safety procedure...the booster jet would sent the fighter tumbling ass over nose if left "live" during vertical flight—and tightened her grip on the control stick as she pulled the thrust vector handle all the way back.

There was a groan as the Rattler's engine nacelles began to rotate backwards, along with the outer third of the wings. The Rattler bucked a little, nosing upwards in strained protest, before settling down. Daria relaxed her grip.

"Get your hand off the speedbrake. You won't need it."

Outside the canopy, the world seemed to sink away, An unnerving, but perfectly normal effect as the main engines dragged themselves heavenward.

Almost immediately, she was cutting back the throttle—the full engine thrust could keep the Rattler in the air, but the afterburners were what kept it from descending. But they did their job too well—kicking the plane into a climb. Perfect for a jump-jet takeoff, but a nightmare when trying to maintain a hover.

_Nightmare nothin'_...Daria thought, as she struggled to maintain a slight forward velocity, well below stall speed, over a moving target.

At dusk.

Somewhere in the back of her skull, a little imp asked if she was still glad she wasn't manning a register at a box store. Or occasionally selling a penny dreadful to Argosy, the imp added, before skipping away, giggling.

The speed...that was almost the worst of it. A terrain landing, even a vertical one, could be almost routine. A midair docking, at near cruising speed, was even easier; if you could match speed with the target, you could just about pull up over the deck, drop the gear straight down, and set the parking brakes before you cut the engines.

Wild Weasel had been right, though—she wasn't going to need the speedbrake—the plane was rapidly bleeding off forward energy, but even the forward inertia—140 knots. _Gear!_—that had the aircraft sliding towards the carrier was closing the distance frighteningly fast. They were almost on top of the main rotor, descending again...she relit the burners, pulled open the gear lever with a fluid yank. Climbing again, more drag...

She was halfway across the _Bifid's_ 2700' beam, first rotor clear.

Her arm had taken on a spasming rhythm as she clutched the throttle, killing and relighting the afterburners from second to second. Cut the throttles again—still a bit fast. _Damnit._

She was over the pair of amidships rotors—almost matching the carrier's speed—and sliding frighteningly low over the blades. A debate club in the pits of her brain began wondering if the jet might be drawn with the downwash and minced before or after it's own exhaust melted through the rotors to send the _Bifid_ into a crashing heap with all souls aboard...and they were already clear before it became an issue.

The external flight deck of the helicarrier was fairly small, by modern standards. Only 400 feet—the length of a 40 storey building laid on it's side, and not quite a third of that wide.

From the air, it seemed even smaller...

From the air...and a little high, a little fast. Spindoctor cursed, silently. As if it weren't bad enough—she could abort, go around for another try. It would have been permitted, even expected...but it was probably never going to be a completely ideal approach, was it?

It was her instructor's stone silence that decided more than anything else, in those few instants of time.

She knew, just _knew_ he was watching her as more than just a teacher.

The old campaigner eyeing a contender. _Are they good enough? Reliable?_

_Worth keeping around? One of 'us,' or just another one of..._

_"Screw it"_ she pulled the life from the engines, and nosed up, ever slightly. Obligingly, the Rattler began a controlled plunge towards the deck. _Sink or swim, kiddo..._

_There it was..._she'd descended into the worst part. The sickening part. The sweet, horrifying moments in a prow landing before wheels-down when the cockpit view of the target became completely blocked by the blind matte of the Rattler's own body. To the pilot, the grand ship below had just as well disappeared.

Crawling around the canopy to regain visual contact wouldn't be worth the effort...in fact, with the concentration she found herself applying to the landing, it would have been suicidal—

There was a _kick_, form rear and starboard, as one of the gear hit the deck. _One_ of the gear—she'd come down crooked, after all. Crooked in the damned vertical axis, no less...and in the few fractions of a second, Daria felt it—she knew—the error was not correcting itself. In another blink, it was going to be the wings digging into the...

The jinked, hard, on the control stick, forward left, and slammed the throttles closed.

The Rattler pivoted on it's right gear like a knife switch, sending the other two tires crashing onto the landing pad. "Crash," the be correct, was unfair. It was a landing proper as it could be. But "gentle" enough that the ginger pill that was crushed into powder as Daria sucked it between her teeth was the only thing that saved her from cracking a molar.

As the engines died, Daria spared a glance over the side of the canopy. She could see the deck of the Helicarrier again...it had stopped moving, while the countryside continued to roll along below. "Touchdown" she said, quietly, keying her mike.

There was a pause, long enough that she almost repeated herself, before the intercom spoke. "_Very_ good," Wild Weasel replied, with an odd note of kindness. Contentedness, even. "Please page the tower for pushback. Sir."

"_F-A-B,_" Daria's brain croaked, numbly. Sliding her hands off the stick. Her fingers quickly pranced across the comm board, rewarding her with a dull mechanical voice over the radio when "pri-fly" confirmed her passcode. "Iden-tity confirmed. Proceedtoent-er. Welcomeaboard." it paused, then added "Have a nice day."

Within the minute, a robot "jet donkey" had crawled out of the hanger at the rear of the flight deck, and hooked onto the tail of the Rattler with a _thunk._ Daria watched it approach over her shoulder—as best she could, with the body of the jet in the way. And at that, she found herself distracted by the silhouette in the dorsal turret, backlit by the strobing caution lights of the robot.

Her instructor was leaning back in his seat, easily scratching away at a clipboard. He never even glanced up—he could just as well have been doing a crossword puzzle on a beach. She decided she was going to take that as a good sign, for the moment.

With a surprising smoothness, the Donkey began dragging the fighter backwards, wheels rumbling over the rubbery non-skid runway coating. Daria instinctively looked away from the exterior view, just before a pang of vertigo hit. After a moment's debate, she chose to forgot snapping down another ginger pill—it might look a tad too undignified (And she'd want to save some for the trip back, to boot).

The were inside the cover of the hanger presently. The _Argent Bifid_ was not, any longer, a combat vessel, but like any other carrier, the hanger deck was cramped to the point of overflow; mostly palettes of cargo and equipment, rather than materiel, but hanging overhead from the cavernous roof was the entire half-dissected fuselage of an EB-50 e-w plane (the "Uncle Slam"— it's name, judging from the nose art, which she couldn't help but noticing as the Rattler was pushed flinchingly close underneath it—had certainly seen better days).

The robot slid to a stop, briefly sagging Daria back into her seat cushions from inertia. She automatically tapped on the parking brake, and played a trailing pattern over a row of buttons beside the panel. There were a few dial-tone sighs, and the last of the avionics went dark. The bird was asleep.

She left her headset hanging on the ejection handle as she cracked the canopy, gliding it open with a pneumatic hiss, and hefted herself over portside, to the crude wire ladder than deployed automatically. The motion was without even a vestige of "daintiness"—she'd long gotten used to not wearing a skirt on the job.

Below on the deck, Wild Weasel already waited, still scratching away on his board. She didn't think he'd even noticed her presence, until the man spoke; "You neglected to return the wings to horizontal."

A bolt of panic went through her, momentarily, before being choked down by reason. And mild annoyance.

"I was told" _by you_ "that this is the exception made for naval landings. To reduce deck footprint, and deflect jet-"

"-jet blast. As it does. Very good." the man finished, not breaking his gaze from the clipboard (she didn't _think_. He hadn't removed his helmet—he never did, not that it was unusual for the company they kept).

The man tapped at the form with his pen. "I see you've already qualified...on two vehicles so far,— yes?" he asked, raising the pen to chin level, quizzically. The effect was somewhat eerie...not the least because he should have known damn well what she was certified for, already.

"That's right, the 'Stinger' and the...combat flight pod." The subject was a sore one, as things went. The former vehicle, the "Stinger," was little more than an unlicensed copy of a Land Rover ripoff. Daria herself had an inconspicuously uparmored one at her apartment garage. And the latter...

"_'Pod'?_ By that you mean the...?" Wild Weasel lead on. Cocky bastard wasn't going to let it slide.

"'Trubble Bubble.' That's right." Spindoctor answered, with not a bit of a wince.

"Yes...good, _simple_ platform. Recently retired, wasn't it?"

Daria narrowed her eyes, imperceptibly. "Well...it was getting a little long in the fang. Besides," she shrugged, "it's probably time I traded up." she patted the side of the Rattler, semi-fondly. Strange...through her glove, and the thick layer of paint, twenty-plus tons of metal felt very much like a living thing.

"If you insist..." her instructor looked back to his clipboard, a moment, before gesturing towards Daria with his pen, like a conductor's baton.

"_You_ need practice, and more than than technical skill to _master_ this aircraft..."

For a second, Daria felt a cold, tingling sensation beneath her gorge. But it was suddenly allayed when the man whipped his hand back to the paper. "...but that's true of everyone. The flight qualification is yours." he finished, adding checkmark and signature with a quick flourish.

He looked up. "...and keep your officer's vehicle proficiency requirement?" he added, with an odd tilt of his helmet.

Spindoctor smirked right back. "I prefer to think of it as 'keeping my flight pay.'"

Wild Weasel made a horrible noise that might have been a laugh.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

The delegation arrived just after the "purple-shirts" finished refueling the Rattler.

Heading it up strode a tall, svelte blonde wearing a slick uniform that engulfed all but her head, and a burning air of _extreme_ confidence.

Spindoctor was actually a bit disappointed...the good doctor didn't wear her usual uniform blouse. And she carried it so well—

"Commandant!" The blonde said, with a crisp nod. "A pleasure to have you aboard, sir."

"Thanks. All mine, I assure you, Professor Deming..." Daria replied, glancing across the small pack of department heads and their praetorians. "...Dr Arkville couldn't join us?"

She was sure she heard Deming's teeth clack together as the woman suppressed a grimace. "He...my apologies, sir, we thought you had been told. The doctor has been, ah...dispatched on a _temporary sabbatical_."

Daria's blood turned a little colder. It was a standard style euphemism, really, though the "temporary" qualifier provided _less_ comfort when it came to lab and research personnel. With their lot, "Not Killed..." could far too frequently be paired with "...unfortunately" or "...so god help us if It breaks free."

And with the project at hand...not good, check one.

"That's...unfortunate." she replied, drawling. She let the unease percolate a couple of seconds, before affecting a lazy shrug.

"But no reason not to continue as planned, I think. Besides..." she gave a ghost of a smile, "..._I'm_ eager to see this _wunderwaffe_ that I've been bankrolling." That was an exaggeration, of course—the Cobra 'Public Affairs' division (something between PR and agitprop, when the two weren't outright combined) _had_ taken up funding and overseeing most of the project, in the agreement with herr doktor Mindbender's applied sciences, but her own financial stake was fairly minimal. Unlike some of her...contemporaries, she didn't care to gamble her Nest Egg for a chance at prize shares.

But...Deming wouldn't know that. And it sure got her point across, well.

She excused herself a second, long enough to scoop up her flight bag from where she'd set it, against the nosewheel. Her former instructor was already clambering, silently, up to the Rattler's cockpit.

"You'll be back for the pickup in the morning?" she asked, checking herself before she mentioned the specific time. It never paid to let people know exactly how long it'd be till you were missed.

The helmet nodded. "To base camp, as scheduled. I won't keep you waiting." Wild Weasel's focus was already buried in the aircraft as he settled into his seat, flashing a hand signal utterly meaningless to Daria to the deck crew as he strapped himself in. And that was that.

She let Deming lead the way from the hanger deck as she rejoined the group. "I...understand you've come straight from the Nepal recovery dig, sir..." the woman said, pleasantly, "there must have been some..._fascinating_ finds."

"...'Gooble gobble.'"

Deming nearly tripped. "Wh-pardon me?"

Daria didn't even break stride. "Freaks. Hyperborean monstrosities, professor..." she glanced backwards, cued by the unmistakable shriek of the Rattler's engines spooling up.

Daria tossed a stiff wave at the plane's pilot before finishing; "...I'm up for a good sideshow as much as the next girl, but one does like an occasional _break_ from the parade..." she glanced pointedly at the scientist, over the top of her glasses. "...wouldn't you agree?"

Spindoctor actually missed the nervous expression appear on Deming's face—the blurring of her naked eyes saw to that, more than the doctor's efforts at hiding it. Not that it mattered, really. Daria knew she'd put it there.

On the other hand, she also missed, across the hanger, Wild Weasel return her wave. Though the pilot had waited for her to turn her head away before he quietly curled his two middle fingers palmward, just for a second. Safely out of her sight.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Author's Notes: Yes, the first chapter of the INCREDIBLY drawn-out and delayed third installment of the "Daria: Agent of Cobra" series, now available on , with more to come!

Medal design by, and used with permission of, Starviper on joecustoms dot com.

Next chapter will, of course, include more horrible in-jokes, cameos, puns, and war crimes. Also the Youtube playlist soundtrack, if anyone's interested.


	2. Virus of the Mind

**Chapter 2: "Virus of the Mind"**

* * *

><p>⁂ ⁂ ⁂<p>

They stopped briefly at the carrier "gedunk" bar for a coffee (De-khat. Daria was trying to cut back.), before heading off for business. Which, naturally, involved a shortage of elevators and a great deal of walking.

"'Your first time on a helicarrier, director?" Deming asked, at one point.

"I worked out of the _Cagliostro_ for awhile." Spindoctor huffed in reply. Not quite the same thing, really, as the latter had gone down in Borneo when Daria still used a children's library card. The beast had been a "stone frigate" lodged in the jungle ever since...but still serving the organization well.

In fact, Daria was reminded, as they opened the blast doors to the production hall, their purposes were almost identical. The doors slid apart, and a gust of warm air pushed away the permeating dank of oil and old paint, replacing it with an odor endearingly damiliar...ink.

Fresh ink, and the crisp dust of new paper.

The hall ran through the spine of the ship; a "cathedral of work" a thousand feet long. The metal-plate walkway that ran it's length was mostly empty of equipment-it was only a thoroughfare, wide enough to march through, 20 abreast.

The actual _work_ was done in the 13 goliath machine-blocks that spoked out, staggered, on either side of the passageway, rising to meet the shadows of the ceiling four storeys up, and out to the hall bulkheads a few stone's throws laterally.

The path itself was spotlit, but the long wings faded into a wash of shadow, and the rare glint off of violet metal. Few of the workers were visible-and then in silhouette in one of the plant-block windows, but most of them were there, she knew, just out of sight. In the pits between the machines.

Daria actually smiled, a little. Fritz Lang could eat his pretty little heart out.

A lone crewman-one of _her_ crewmen, actually.-popped into view to her side, rising on one of the industrial lifts linking the thoroughfare and the work pits. The man was an "Ink Viper," plainly, with a a work apron stained almost as dark as his ubiquitous Cobra "bandit scarf."

The Viper manhandled a a fellow traveler off the lift-an industrial trash bin, filled with defective examples of some of the _Bifid's_ primary exports. In this case, literally, it's cash crop...

The bin was, to Daria's practiced lack of amazement, overflowing with fresh reams of $100 bills.

Counterfeit, of course. And it might not all have been money packed in there-Nork "Supernotes" were still only a small fraction of the ship's production. Manuals. Leaflets. Admail, "underground" newspapers, and even the latest copy of _Cobra Life_ magazine; each of the thirteen machine-blocks was a complete publishing plant in itself, and the _Bifid,_ for the sum of all it's glory, a gargantuan, flying print shop.

Anywhere in the world...any time, any place, with just enough lead time, the _Bifid_ could be on station to deploy Cobra's wares. "Mighter" or not...the pen was the spearhead. It laid the path.

The Ink Viper with the bin gave the bulky thing a heave, and started trundling down the walkway-cutting in front of Daria and the Good Doctor. Not a sign of disrespect, probably. The fellow likely hadn't even known there were there.

_'Certainly didn't _hear_ us..._Daria thought, sourly. The production hall was, as usual, a bellowing cacophony of machines. She couldn't help but eye the Viper's brace of electronic earpieces jealously. For her brief trip through the facility, she hadn't bothered even with ear plugs, let alone noise cancellation headsets with a line to the ship's Muzak channel. She was already starting to regret it.

"...like to express our sincere apologies for the report backlog," Deming was saying-hell, shouting, almost screaming in Daria's ear to be heard. "...but with the results we've been getting-we've been swamped, all of us. I couldn't even get away to the Ryugyong conference..." the doctor glanced at Daria oddly, and for a moment, the spiel slipped away.

"How _was_ it, this year, by the way? I know this was your first presentation-I was _kicking_ myself for missing it..." It was curiosity, in the scientist's voice. Simple, gawkish, curiosity. Very human.

Daria smiled, thinly. "Oh, wonderful. I always wanted to visit Eastasia." She caught herself, suddenly-the ship must have made some tiny change to her altitude or heading, and the floor of the production hall had been long worn down to bare metal. For someone without their sea-air?-legs, it could be fairly slick. Even disorienting...

She became aware of a familiar pang rising in her gullet. _Damnit._ "Look, 'doc,' how about you start filling me in while we're on our way? I'm all ears." The 'prof,' like most, tended to ramble, once she got on a choice topic...and Daria sure as hell could use a nice, soothing distraction to listen to for a little while.

Deming brightened, visibly. _On the nosey. _"Oh...! Of _course, _sir_...well, _as you well know, Cobra has been far ahead in the field of applied psychotronics for many years. Hypnosis, subliminal programming, even electronic brainwave manipulation.

"However, as impressive as these have been, these processes have always had serious drawbacks. Audio-visual brainwashing is notoriously easy to neutralize with the proper counter-signal, and electronic methods have almost always required close contact with special equipment..."

"...And all of them tend to leave the...'subjects' in a stupor, at best." Spindoctor found herself saying, out loud.

"Well, I...feel that might be a bit of an overstatement, sir-but that certainly raises a valid point; to date, most existing 'thought reform' methods rely on _hindering_ brain function. Shutting down or bottlenecking normal neural activity to obtain a desired change in behavior. Achieved with anything short of actual surgery, this is an inherently unstable condition, which impairs the function of the subject in addition..."

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

In brief minutes, the two had crossed the great length of the production hall, finally giving Daria the reason and motivation to interrupt Deming's oral cavalcade of the history of modern mind control.

"You're preaching to the inquisitor, doctor. I'm here to see what this project brings to the table," Spindoctor said, on reaching the far door. _At least the _acute_ nausea passed_...

Like almost everything in a Cobra outfit, "door" was a bad understatement; it was the size of an airline hanger, and opened into an elevator platform the size of her old house.

Very subtly, though, it had a visual "kink" that made it stand out; the quill-and-chessman insignia of Cobra Public Affairs, emblazoned large, and unaccompanied by the emblem of Cobra, proper.

When the _Bifid_ had still been fighting air battles off the Sidra and Sargasso, this had been the gateway to the most sensitive portions of the ship: arsenal, engineering section, "CnC"...a cavern system, physically isolated from the rest of the vessel. The "castle keep."

Most of it had more mundane uses, now, secure as it all was. But the real significance was more...intangible.

Beyond that threshold, officially, you were in "black-tile country." The _Bifid_, jurisdiction aside, was still command's ship, but this-this was Public Affairs' private territory. Whoever she answered to-this section reported only to _her_.

In theory, anyway. In practice, really, the distinction was almost academic. Forgotten, if not ignored.

And yet, it was still a reminder that filled Daria with a grim sort of..._something._ She thought it might even be pride.

They crossed the line, and entered. The silence that replaced the clamor of the production hall as the blast doors closed was as suddenly eerie as it was a relief.

Deming prodded a keypad on the platform. It lurched, hard, but then began an easy ascent with well-oiled smoothness. Spindoctor edged away from a rack of cargo that'd been left on the platform-a rack of high quality bond rag. Safely secured, granted. But with each sumo-sized spool weighing in excess of a ton, she didn't fancy standing in the shadow of a pile of 'em.

The scientist quickly responded to Daria's not quite repeated question.

"Well, director," she said, "the practice of thought manipulation, of course, predates Dawkins' meme theory by many years-the very presence of this division is testament to that. But it has _never_ been undertaken from a wholly _scientific_ approach, with a solid backing of cognitive neuroscience..."

The platform was moving slowly; they'd only risen past two or three decks, if Daria had counted the lights right. "...but even the optimal, greatest examples of concept engineering-like Morrison, or Lucas-were based on at _least_ a groping understanding of archetype theory, and even the works of Bernays" _"Peace be Upon Him,"_ Spindoctor tacked on, mentally, "-were built from a primitive form of applied psychology."

The platform glided to a stop near the top of it's shaft, where a door marked "LEVEL X" was already opening.

"...but of course, until now, it's all been 'through a glass, darkly.' Blind manhandling of processes barely understandable. A...'preoperative stage' of development."

"And _yours_ isn't," Daria said, not quite as a question. "You've pulled it off?"

"Well, the proof is in the execution, director," Deming replied. Rather proudly, at that. "...as you'll see tonight."

They had reached the entry gate to the laboratory-a sturdy set of blast doors liberally festooned with with warning signs. Daria was particularly impressed with the one that read "WARNING: TELEPATHIC HAZARD. NO SENSITIVES BEYOND THIS POINT!," complete with the standard "jagged psi" symbol and an icon of a stick figure grabbing at his bursting skull.

Entry security was standard fare-handscan, passcode, mouth check, retinal flash. Nothing unusual, save that the latter always left her half-blind for a minute or so.

Past the outer set of doors, however, was the odder bit. A two-man team-counting the mandatory BAT-were waiting, stationed backs against a partition line crudely painted halfway inside the airlock-like antechamber.

Neither guard turned his (it's) head to within more than a few degrees of the line as Daria and Deming switched between them for the patdown...for recording instruments. Not even a pen was to be allowed in, and the search was thorough-the Guardsman even opened the access panel to examine the toroid chamber of her sidearm before handing the weapon back to Daria.

True, as an officer, she rarely had to disarm...but still, it was unusually off-putting.

On the wall behind the Guardsman, at head level and just beyond the dry brown splatterstain that intersected the line, was a glass pegboard; the one she'd been told to expect. Most of the "Cubby holes" were empty, but there was a plastic case with her codename dymo'd to it on a shelf labeled "VIPs"...

It was protective equipment, after a fashion. The handful of components weighed and took up less space-and probably cost as much-as a pack of cards. But, Daria mused, popping the fitted rubber blinders onto her eyeglass frames they might be just as life saving as the most elaborate armors of Cobra's hazardous environment grunts.

If. If her inspection found anything of value, tonight.

She checked the fit, first. _Perfect_-the rubber gaskets blotted out even her meager peripheral vision. Though it probably made her look like Doctor Cyclops. Hopefully, they wouldn't fog up.-before she applied the last element: two little plastic discs, dimly translucent, and highly polarized, with a near mirror sheen.

They snapped onto her glasses' lenses, like an ordinary pair of clip-on sunglass lenses (though they were specifically "not intended for outdoor recreation," according to a blurb prominently written on the case. She would never have guessed).

Daria took a look around the room. The "optical seal" held, with not much effect, visually, that she could make out...except that the _clear_ glass in Deming's own eye protection-the other woman wore an almost comical mad scientist-type set of welder's goggles that she'd had pushed over her brow-had apparently turned dark maroon.

"All set, director?"

Daria replied, purely wholly expressionless, with a thumbs up.

"Excellent—If you'll follow me..."

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

It was not actually the first viral weapons laboratory that Daria had ever visited.

That distinction belonged to a pleasant little hovel outside of 'Vegas, during her second year on the job, when Spindoctor'd been dispatched to oversee the PR campaign for a community outreach and free clinic center.

Alas, it was a bust...the most that came out of the whole sorry affair was that Daria finally had the chance to find out what burning napalm smelled like. (Benzene and Durian fruit. Which, admittedly, had smelled like victory at the time)

On the other hand...in spite of the high praises of _it's_ creators, "strain XV-D" hadn't actually been able to infect people just from _looking_ at it.

_No, of course not...that would be _my_ bag._

The Dr. Archibald Venom Memorial Laboratory was a long, blazing hive of glowing screens and electronic displays...or should have been. She guessed it was.

The hell of the thing was, aside from the eerie half-light they seemed to cast, most of the tapestry hall of screens looked blank black.

That was the glasses' work, of course, and with good reason. This lab was the center, the Manhattan Project, on the engineering of...

"...Memes. An idea, a concept, or thought process that spreads like a biological virus. Evolution in it's most astract, _pure_ form." Deming summed up, proudly. Spindoctor wouldn't dream of interrupting the spiel-the scientist had obviously worked on it.

"And what nature can spawn through trial and error, science can create through deliberate effort." The two had continued their stroll down the main axis of the lab-glam and grandeur aside, it wasn't all that large. And a liberal amount of divider screens between the department "cells" broke it up further, making it impossible to see from one end to the other.

One of the first _kellia_ she showed Spindoctor belonged to the "Earworm Project" detachment-which was somewhat cluttered by reams of highlighted sheet music pinned to the bulkhead, and a Televiper crumpled over a MIDI controller. Deming had given a concise rundown on the use of fractal leitmotif generation in preexisting music form architectures...though Daria found herself more distracted by a haunting melody she faintly overheard from the Viper's headset.

She found her mind returning to it, as the tour continued...and then for a few weeks afterward.

Dynamic buzzword generations...Aarne-Thompson recalibration...consent fabrication...Jungian fractals...all fine and good. And mostly on schedule, with a minimum of casualties. But besides that...

"...professor," she drawled, at the _Vergeltungswitz_ section, which featured several more polarized-out monitors, and a Baboon's EEG, "...are there any projects you can show me that I can see _without_ scrambling my brains?"

Deming looked taken aback. "Well..._sir_, I have to _insist_, these safety precautions are truly-I mean I'm sorry, but if they _could_ be circumvented, there'd be no _point_ in even-"

"...so 'No'. Look, I'm satisfied that you're not just blowing your budget on booze, but this simply isn't an efficient use of inspection time. Mine _or_ yours..." Daria sighed...she'd really been putting this off, hadn't she? "...and we both know that this _isn't_ the main event I came here to see."

The Professor seemed to hesitate, glancing around the department booths-lingering on a couple of rather snazzy looking ones that they hadn't yet visited-before turning back to Daria, with a sigh of her own.

"I...suppose not, sir." She broadly gestured down the lab, head sagging. "The test chamber is right this way, if you're ready." Daria nodded assent, and let the professor lead the way.

Not that she'd show it, but Daria was, in her own way, as depressed as Deming. For her own, quite different reasons.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

The test chamber was at the end of the lab; all one could see in the dim light was a full height plate of mirrored glass taking up the terminating bulkhead, inset with a sturdy door. There were a few terminals at the flanks, but the section was pretty bare. Dark. Unsassuming. Quiet.

Company awaited them.

"This is Wong," Deming said, waving towards a blueshirt leaning in an office chair with his back against a wall, thumbing through a copy of _Spank._ The man's combat gear was sparse-at the mention of his name, he'd looked up, saluting in greeting with a smile; he wasn't even wearing a face mask.

"He's illiterate, and he can't speak english." _The perfect lifeguard._

There were a couple of others. Dr. Marks, she'd seen already. And the other one...

He had a good six inched on her, with the flared helmet. The figure stood at parade rest, facing the chamber window. His hands were empty, though she half expected him to be tapping a riding crop...maybe he had one hidden on the bandoliers strapped over his charcoal peacoat.

The man's head craned back, vulture like, to look at the new visitors, before he turned, slowly, on his heals. He was solidly built, to be sure, but overall, the figure's impression was more unsettling than anything else.

Daria took his hand as soon as it was extended.

"...'Interrogator.'" she said, with a nod, very studiously averting her gaze from the faint _moire_ patterns in the man's red faceplate.

"_Hey."_ he replied. He spoke it like a loanword, enunciating just a little too precisely, in an electronic barritone.

"I didn't think you were going to make it. 'Other duties.'" Daria said. In fact, according to the rumor mill, the man had been visiting his predecessor, the _first_ Interrogator.

Who now had his own sanitarium wing, spending his days playing checkers with phantoms.

"Oh, it was pleasant. But I don't see how I _could_ resist an occasion like _this._"

Knowing him, that was to be expected. So said the knot growing in the pit of Daria's stomach.

The helmet nodded, deeply, over her shoulder. "...but I believe the doctor was just forgetting to tell us the plan for the evening?"

Deming barely showed any irritation. Hardly even a scowl. "Well, _sir,_ it hardly bears reiterating...but this test is merely, humbly, the _culmination_ of the practice of thought reform," she gesticulated, freely, "...the Platonic ideal of rhetoric, and propaganda; the unattainable goal of neuropharmacology's crude fumblings...to imprint upon a human mind as easily as newsprint in a press. Mind control...through _pure linguistics!"_

_Nicely done, _Daria thought. And indeed, there was a part of her, not so deep down at all. that brimmed fascination for the prospect. Curiosity, awe, and a note of pride for her part in it. Still just a mousy scholar at heart.

But that lay ashen with dread...

The Professor flipped on the lights in the test chamber with a flourish: the room behind the mirror blazed into view with the whine of spotlights.

Inside, it was fairly bare. A bulky-and visibly old-computer terminal sat in a rear corner; and in the center, at a right angle to the direction of the window, was a single chair.

A very sturdy, reinforced chair.

Deming had already unbolted the chamber door, and ushered in a gray smoked technician. "Warm up the equipment," she said, "the 'source material' will be up shortly."

The tech made a muffled reply as he-Daria thought it was a he-clamped on another layer of cranial protection.

As the door _clunked_ shut, Deming turned back to the visitors. "With your permission...If you're ready, sir?"

Down to her, no less.

Finding her mouth oddly dry, Spindoctor nodded okay.

Deming actually _smiled_, and clicked her lapel mike.

"Lab speaking...ready to begin first series. Send up the first _Maruta._"

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

The Brute emerged into the chamber, appearing out of a shadow black passageway hidden behind a wall panel.

He was arcane looking, and every bit his role, to say the least...

Bright wedges of eyes glaring out from under a sack hood; a shirtless, proud display of muscles; a loop of rawhide hanging on a wide belt...hell, Daria was surprised he was actually wearing shoes.

He almost stormed in, one arm taught behind him, dragging a chain at neck level.

His guest trailed in, stumbling, after.

They—"she," it was a woman—was a burly, solid specimen, almost disproportionate to her height, and fitted unflatteringly in a hi-vis jumpsuit.

The forearms were bare, as were the hands, and looked powerful—though with an unhealthy skin pallor settling over a normal bronze, sure sign of recent time cloistered indoors...and which were clutched furiously around the chain to a collar.

The young woman's face sneered with indignation as she fought her forward progression, actually managing to stall in her tracks for a second, seemingly by sheer force of will, straining alarmingly hard against her bonds.

A brief flash of neck revealed, Daria couldn't help but notice, hardly a sign of redness, but also a rather large mole. The collar had not been fastened long.

The halt in the procedures was brief, as another pair of figures soon appeared from the doorway; two much more mundane guards, compared to Slave Master, though odder equipped.

The closer one raised his impliment—a silver, spindly thing, terminating in tuning fork-like prongs...Spindoctor thought it was called a "Megafauna"-something-or-other—into a lazy shoulder stance, and prodded it into the prisoner's shoulder.

There was a glowing, Jacob's Ladder effect down the prongs, and the woman jumped forward, yelping from shock. She wheeled around, shackled wrists raised in an impotent whimsy of a threatened blow, rattling off invectives at the guard even as Slave Master tugged her towards the chair. It was muted, behind slabs of glass and metal, but it didn't sound like english—not American english, anyway, not from the lip motions, Spindoctor thought. Too fast, and too controlled. And the pitch was wrong...

A part of Daria was musing, grimly. She couldn't help it, wondering where they'd found the unfortunate in the chamber. A slave? Not likely...she didn't look it; she obviously hadn't been missing many meals. Probably not a penal battalion, either—she didn't have the bearing. No crushed spirit, but no feral, tooth and claw resistance, either—not like someone who knew what was coming.

Maybe they'd just "knocked over" a prison bus. It was known to happen—if recruiting was low, or Cobra needed some people who wouldn't be missed.

They got the subject into the chair with a surprising lack of manhandling. It was no sign of kindness, though—just practice. This was an assembly line procedure, no need for wasted effort. The chair itself did a lot of the work, as it operated on a scheme of pressure and control points; manacles sprung out of the frame automatically, as soon as a limb fell into position. Clasping over key leverage points, six clamps would hold a body as securely as a straightjacket.

They were taking more care with the head, and as the technicians hooked the Ludovico restraints into place, Deming started up again.

"First subject is...just out of the 18-24 range, 'normal'"—she said the word with a note of disdain—"I.Q., no history of mental illness or neural injury. There were noted tendencies towards Conduct Disorder, but examination shows all personality disorders to be within acceptable tolerances." So, not a psychopath, just a blackguard. "...but more importantly, the subject is functionally literate, and bilingual..."

Inside the chamber, Slave Master made a final tightening on the head strap, and flashed a thumbs up towards the window; Deming rapped on the chamber door's observation window. Happily.

As the crew filed out, Deming nodded to Spindoctor, beaming. "The first test Memotype is a sixteen word polyglot phrase of English and Spanish, generated by supercomputer under our linguistic guidelines. Grammar, vocabulary, and subject chosed are calculated to be statistically impossible to occur in normal human conversation...of course, none of us has actually seen it ourselves.

"This is, of course, merely a proof of concept design. Early in the development as we are, we've already developed single-language 'Armements' to achieve the same effect."

For the record...Spindoctor thought. "That being?"

Deming puffed up, happily. "In brief, a neural short circuit. Once received and analyzed by the brain's Wernickes Area, it will produce a corrupted engram, derailing higher cognition and sending a massive stimulus to the brain stem via the hypothalmus. The effect..." the professor gave a whimsical shrug, "...'fight or flight.' A turnicated, warped form. In this case, 'flight.' Pure terror, to a level unexperienced outside of a prey species..."

"'Wow'," Interrogator cut in, drawling, cocking his head. "Impressive...and as subtle as an ice pick to the skull."

"Well...yes, sir, but it's only an example of phase one of the series—psychosomatic effects, like hysterical blindness, astasia-abasia, pseudoseizures, aphonia...admittedly crude, prototypical efforts, but the more intricate applications aren't that far—"

"I think we all know how useless newborn babies are, Professor." Spindoctor said, "let's see the dance, all right?"

"Y-yes...yes, Spindoctor! Marks!" Deming beckoned, waving.

The frazzled, bearded old scientist in a lab smock and a pair of horn rims scurried up front, gripping a thin case before him like a drink tray.

Before he could speak, Deming snapped the order, "Begin loading the code phrases into the server."

Dr. Marks backed towards the the most grandiose of the room's computer terminals, cracking open his cargo as he walked, withdrawing the item inside.

Deming explained; "For safety reasons, the phrase data is normally kept bisected, except for testing. We'll transmit it to the test chamber now..."

"I see," Daria said, "...though I haven't seen one of those in awhile." She nodded towards the terminal. "...that's not a 5-1/4", is it?"

"Eight-inch, single sided, read only." Marks piped up—she'd have thought he was mute, or at least wasn't listening. "It can store almost six hundred and fifty kilobits of data—and it needed almost half that for this test series alone!"

The disk slid home with a satisfying clik, and the latch on the front of the drive bezel snapped closed.

"Another precaution, of course. Limited cross compatibility reduces the chance of misuse."

"Or espionage, I take it. 'Can't be more than a dozen of those left in the world." If Cobra hadn't built it from scratch, it had to be older than she was. Considerably.

Which also meant...she did the arithmetic for 'kilobits' in her head. Then rechecked, disbelieving. Small. Damned small. Enough to contain an overly aggressive poem, maybe, depending on the format.

A lot of fuss over such a little thing. Of course, the core of Fat Man had been a lump of metal the size of her fist...

Marks' terminal beeped, and the tech inside the chamber made an overlarge "OK" gesture.

"Code banks loaded, system armed."

The wall opposing the fettered unfortunate had been painted matte white; there wasn't that much glare when the screened overhead projector in the chamber snapped on. Just a ghastly white reflection in her eyes—which the subject met with a fresh snarl. Maybe the light hurt...

Marks spoke, "Beginning test of item Aklos-1, version zero-point-nine-niner, test one, series bet-"

"Final warning, King-Yellow Event. 20 seconds to Zero Time. Put on Goggles or Turn Away"...said a recorded voice, as a computer stepped on the doctor's line.

"...predicted time of action is 8.5 seconds."

A "cherry top" beacon light on the ceiling flipped on, twirling a rotating band of light. Not bad...they'd at least give someone epilepsy. No klaxon though. Maybe they were slipping.

The subject inside the chamber was moving again. Muted by layered glass and metal, the tone was almost inaudible...but plain with outraged fury.

Daria realized she'd been staring at the woman's face intently enough that she'd almost missed the countdown entirely...

"6...(a beat)...4...3..."

A mollyguard was flipped away, exposing a marasca red tab under a hand's shadow.

"2...1...mark."

The tech brought his thumb down on the switch. Something flickered onto the screen.

Then there was nothing.

Nothing.

True, but deceptively so...the subject had gone quiet. Not struggling, not making a noise. Nothing.

The facial expression was almost unreadable. A slack, dulled surprise, more than anything else...except for the eyes. Hard as it was to see, with all the equipment in the way, they'd gone almost...like a hint of...

"...not even kind of scared," the masked man at her side said.

"A few more moments, please. The average person only reads four words per se—"

The scientist couldn't even finish the last one when the shriek came.

Daria startled—though she didn't jump, though few wouldn't have—she'd glanced around the lab, and it seemed that few hadn't.

"And that _definitely_ isn't," the Interrogator quipped, with actual emotion in his voice. She couldn't help noticing that he'd dropped a hand to gunbelt level.

Much to her own surprise, so had she.

Damned understandable, though...mere words did that noise disservice. "Scream" or "shriek" were for sounds made by a voicebox, to audify feeling, even at it's most insensate, primal tapping.

This...howl...was emotion.

"Howl" was wrong, too...storms "howled." Storms weren't alive. This...this had the raw power, mindlessly unrestrained of a gale, but it was no tempest of dead gasses. Quite the opposite...

They could hear it clear enough through the chamber's thick walls. She wouldn't have thought a person could make that kind of a racket, let along maintain it. She didn't envy the poor tech.

The bound figure's transformation was very sudden, but alarmingly total. Teeth flashed, the body arched against the restraints in electric spasm; every inch of exposed skin seemed to dance with coursing tendon. Muscles didn't ripple—there was nothing left for them to move against.

Daria didn't want to think about the contortion of the thing's spine...she watched, anyway, engrossed helplessly.

She could hear the murmurs behind her, from the lab staff. Nowhere near jubilant.

He'd been right...definately not afraid.

"'Fight or flight,' eh, professor?" Spindoctor said, over her shoulder, grateful for a few moments stolen away from the spectacle. "Half right, anyway..."

Deming was rattled, but not off guard. "An...unexpected development, sir, but not a failure. It did work—and this was simply a test..."

Daria frowned, hmming. She had a point, at that. It took a show of willpower to force her gaze back towards the window.

The thing—if it could still see—had to be literally seeing red, by now; the whites of both eyeballs had gone burst red. It hadn't been a true spasm that'd seized it, she could see now—at least, not any longer.

It was straining against the chair.

Spindoctor thought it might break it's own back if it kept it up. The heavy arm restraints actually rattled against the frame; red marks had appeared at the wrists.

"Don't worry," Deming said, reassuringly, to the unasked question, "the restraints are tested to 500 foot-pounds. They'll hold."

To the doctor's credit, she was right. In a few seconds, to her horror, they did.

Even as the subject tore her way out of the chair with a sickening crash, and lunged across the chamber with a scramble of flesh against slick metal—the limbbands and Ludovico harness had held. Perfectly.

It was free in a lurch, stumbling forward, ruined arms splayed like gull's wings flaring for decent.

Something splattered on the glass. Dark, and ruddy.

In the lab, there was hardly time to gasp, not even enough to swear...and simply no time to react.

The tech in the chamber didn't even have that much. He'd already pushed out of his seat, against the wall—the figure looked more like a mannequin than a human being, swaddled in enough lab gear to cover all traces of flesh, down to the eyes. But his was, disturbingly, becoming the most human looking creature in sight.

What goggled, machine-blank facemask hid, his own hands betrayed—pulled up, palms splayed open and outward. A futile, instinctual attempt at protection. Pure fear.

The subject...what was left of the Maruta had sighted in on him before it was moving—that it could do it at all was astonishing; it had to be en pointe on bare bone.

It charged 'cross the distance and—not so much was upon him as into the man. Through him.

The shriek was an awful, gnashing cry—and the tech lifted—actually lifted off his feet—belly plunged through, tunic fabric drawn taut, soaking red, skewered on ulna and radius...

The man didn't cry out; perhaps he was only muffled, or it had simply been too fast for even that.

His head bobbled, quick, half-vital and out of time with the mad frenzy of blows the Thing landed with it's free...limb, now more like a poor parody of a club, and wielded with subhuman finese.

Somewhere behind Daria, the Professor found her voice. "G...get the VIDET on deck! NOW!" she croaked.

"They won't come in time..." Daria blurted out, in an almost whisper, not even thinking. Too transfixed on the horror before her.

Dr. Marks covered for her—probably by sheer accident. "That's right—if It causes much more instrument damage, we'll lose the experiment data!" The man was almost frantic in his earnestness.

With due concern, at that. The brute was straining, hefting the weight of the pitiful bulk skyward, and bashed the charnel mass down, _very_ hard, into the latter's control terminal.

It crumpled, buckling under like so much scrap. The cathode tube of the monitor had blinked once, white spider-webs of cracks rippling through the glass, before imploding.

There were hardly any sparks, less than she'd expect, but the mangled electronic innards of the equipment went out with a fury—she could hear the arcing pop! thunderfall of low voltages on bare metal.

The man was down, dashed like a ship on a reef, and the Thing was not yet done; it focused a lidless, repulsive leer at it's leavings, and tore down to make work with a flexing jaw...

Daria, to her hazy puzzlement, found that she was in front of the chamber door, staring at the scene through the loophole window.

Maybe she'd done it unknowingly, just to get a better view—or at least a clearer one than the main window, splattered with—

But she was already reaching for the door handle, her mind appraising the situation—even at her most impulsive, she was not foolhardy—and responding, grimly.

The Thing's back was to her, matting the other figure. Her brain raced. No fancy shooting, not that you even could. At this range? A shot'd go through and...even at the lowest...I don't even want to get in there with...don't dare screw around—not with that. Looks like you'd need an elephant rifle already...only got one shot; if you just piss it off...'saw how fast it...'only chance he's got, unless you wanna count on the lab rats and torquemada...

A steely hand appeared at Daria's left bicep, and gently shoved her aside.

"Beat it, please." The Interrogator said, with icy calm, taking Spindoctor's position in front of the door before rapping the window glass with his knuckles. "'_Ay, enfer destine!_" the man barked, startlingly loud—possibly it was amplified by the gear in his helmet.

The outburst's effect was unquestionable. In the chamber, the Maruta jerked up, swiveling around with an awful, bare-eyed glare at the direction of the lab.

_"Listo para un juego de 'hay un Dios'?_" Interrogator said, helmet bobbing luridly to his words. It was a simple visual cue, Daria realized, to focus an uncertain listener's attention. Still, the effect garnered a mocking flavor.

In the chamber, the Thing's ire was raised, again, as it parted it's lips for a renewed scream. It's teeth were no longer even close to white.

There was a snap-hiss as the handle lock cracked open—the masked man must have overriden the door code to do it that fast—and the pressure seal bottomed out. Daria took another pace back, then doubled it.

With his left hand, he cast open the door, wide. The thing was already on it's feet, scrambling. But what escaped was as intangible as it was overwhelming.

The sound, in it's full, awful glory loosed itself, first, and rising; driven ahead like the deluge, was fear itself. The door had been a mental barrier as much as a physical one; horror had sieved through, which inspired panic...but danger and it's dread terror had been secured.

Now gone, the thick, leaden wave that had been held back washed into the lab, and Daria couldn't help but be caught in the moment's awful flow.

The clock crawled forward as the thing in the chamber loped forwards, howling it's charge, drawing out the detail of the instant into sharp, terrific clarity...

The wild, jutting flurry met the threshold, unstopping, image changing in hue as it passed from one flavor of lighting to another. It was all but in arms reach, and grasp. And closing, barreling like a freight car at the man ahead. Inescapable.

His fist flexed...and Daria heard a metallic, squalling rattle.

For a frozen second, he was horribly perfect in form—the vision of a 20th century Artemision...and his arm wheeled forward—fist charged with a glinting implement.

The baton connected with the Maruta's lower back, at just about pelvis level. The legs swept up, the Thing's own momentum carrying it forward even as it lost control of it's direction, sprawling backwards in midair.

Interrogator was moving again—still, he'd never paused, his other hand joining the grip on his weapon as it swept clear underneath the hulking form, and he reversed the swing like a pendulum.

The second blow braked the Thing's forward travel, as it "clotheslined" Itself into the piston that disappeared with a fibery CRACK into it's throat.

A few sparkling jewels caught Spindoctor's eyes, hovering, splitting, and coalescing into new dribulets as gravity hurled the leviathan to the deck.

The final strike met it halfway down. The man had been turning imperceptibly, dancelike, with a fraction of movement and he was at It's prone flanks as he brought the weapon down. He plunged the club down like a mallet, one handed, center mass. Something leapt from his hand, with that same high ring as at the start of the attack.

The tip of the baton smashed into the Thing's torso with crushing force, driving it down to the floor like a slab of meat; sternum visibly sagging under a dark smear on the fabric of the jumpsuit...joined shortly by the pattering of the last drops of flying blood.

It was over. It had barely started, and it was over.

Daria noticed the man was breathing, slow, but very deep, as he knelt to inspect his handiwork.

"Is she..."

"Not quite." he said, tapping the tip of the cosh against the Thing's forehead, and gently pressing it down, recompressing the spring piston as he forced the last resisting part above the limp body back against the floor. The teeth were still snapping.

Interrogator nodded, daintily, into the room it had burst from. "How about him?"

Daria edged forward, sidling over the heap in the doorframe. Over her shoulder, she could already hear Marks wailing over how much data they had to salvage...

The uproar had knocked the projector slightly off-kilter at some point, and the image was skewed, flickering. She couldn't help catching a glimpse at it as she entered—words blurred, beyond recognition by the safeties and the damaged equipment, in two lines on white. The last character looked infuriatingly like a "?"

She hurriedly focused her attention back to her goal, at the remains of the workstation. Her heart sank.

"Well, going between the blood loss, and the penetrating organ injuries..." The poor man was obviously very dead. The sizzling equipment's wreckage sparked, intermittently; bright, harsh blue embers falling on the enmeshed body. It didn't even twitch.

Or electrocution...She frowned. Cobra electronics were notoriously overclocked—a practice that had long given them a decade-odd lead over Silicon Valley, but system failures that were typically catastrophic...

An unsettling thought occured to her. Turning away from the whole sad spectacle, she called out the door.

"Say, doc...was this thing connected to anythi..." she stopped cold. "Um...Doctor Marks?"

The man stood—more leaned, or perched—in front of the server terminal, hands braced ready over the keyboard. Where he'd frozen, gargoyle like, in his tracks.

All but his eyes. Even Daria could see that from here...all but his eyes. Uncovered, and glinting in the screen light. Quivering nystagmiclly.

"Doctor..." she repeated, in a low tone.

The scream that tore from the man was, if less bestial than the ones that had shortly preceded it, no less terrifying for the difference.

It was not—or not merely—a feral bay of rage. It was madness given voice.

The noise, by grace, was struck short as Interrogator swept in behind the doctor, and decked him. Cleanly, at the base of the skull. Marks' fingers rattled across the keyboard as he crumpled to the floor.

He dragged the doctor's body back, by the shoulders—as another tech automatically hopped up to take his place.

The tech glanced at the monitor, paused a moment, and shrieked. Hands clawing at his skull.

Interrogator got ahold of the poor man just as another fresh technician made for the vacant duty station—maybe he had a notion he could shut it down, or the procedure was just drilled in too well—when Wong seized him by the lapels, very loudly belting out an unintelligible clamor. Daria didn't understand the words, but she didn't need to...she could recognize a chewing out when she heard it.

Wong shoved the tech away, and spun into the terminal seat. Spindoctor tensed, but the blueshirt seemed unfazed by whatever horror had seized the display.

Amazingly, the man looked to be actually navigating the display with the trackball—how the devil he was using it at all, she couldn't guess. Pictographs, maybe?

There was little time to ponder. After a scanty tense few second, Wong pounded the desk in a huff—damnedly foolhardy, with Interrogator coiled to pounce again, but Wong paid him no notice, wheeling on his heel, and storming towards the test chamber window.

He drew a practically contraband marker from a bandolier, and with a flurry of motions, had scribbled on the clean side of the gore splattered glass...

It was a quick, hideous little cartouche; a sketch of a smashed computer, smoke twirling up next to a haunted looking face, orbited by some deranged swirls, skulls, and sundry other crazed glyphs. A jagged arrow connected the first cartoon to a smaller one, identical except for an unsmashed computer, more jagged lines from _that_ to a crowd of even smaller, simple drawings of the same...

Wong added a big "!", ran an arrow from it to the tiny faces, finished the whole thing with a flourished underline.

It was better than nothing, if a bit crypti...

Crap.

"What the Hell else was that thing wired into?" she asked. Deming stammered, or tried to.

"The server!" Spindoctor snarled, like a mad dog. "What's it daisychained into?"

"Ev...not—not everything," the scientist said, trying to reassure, "No vital systems—flight controls, engineering, ship operations, all fine. Just lots of connections to unimportant sectors—ah," she started counting off on her fingers, and Spindoctor could imagine the woman's masked eyes rolling to a tally. "...the entertainment net feeds, the order line to the production floor—"

"'Order line'?" Interrogator said, with an enigmatic hint to his voice.

"That's right—for pre-production work, test batches...we do-"

"The presses." Daria hacked in, with deathly cold.

"Good call. I'd have just thought thought the earphones." Interrogator finished. He seemed impressed.

Deming blanched, fingers curling in recoil. "Gods...there must be hundreds of-"

"There's over a thousand Vipers on that floor." Spindoctor said, grimacing. "How long is the update queue?"

"I-I think every five minutes. I'm not sure, but Marks should kno—oh." Deming trailed off, eyes drifting to the lump in front of the terminal.

Daria checked her watch; 7:23 pm. And then just as quickly realized that that told her jack, as she didn't actually know when the supposed five minute cycle started.

"Shut it down."

"But I c—there's no manual..." Deming glanced again at the heap of would-be computer operators, wringing her hands. "Wong!"

She wheeled on the man, almost dragging him towards the terminal, making a frenzied pantomime of "cut it." But he was objecting, loudly. Whatever he was trying to get across, though, it didn't sound like mere reluctance—Daria caught the words "beng kui" repeated, with adamance.

The exact meaning was lost, but the gist seemed clear to her—either he didn't know how to shut it off, or he knew it wasn't going to work. There was no telling what exactly he'd seen on that basilisk monitor...

She checked her watch again. The minute digit clicked forward, at that. Damn it.

The two were still arguing...and as Spindoctor drew her hand up, and leveled it.

"Excuse me" she said, cranking the seer slider under her thumb all the way to "max."

The debaters' attention diverted, just as a power cell frisson came through the the ergo grip in her hand.

"...roll off."

Her arm wagged sideways before she zeroed the pistol back on the server housing.

The two gaped like fawns for a split-second before absorbing the hint, and scrambled aside.

The charge diode on the weapon blinked rapidly, then went steady.

Daria squeezed the trigger.

There was the slight baby's breath of pressure against her palm as the pistol discharged, recoiling against the dulcet keen of liquid fire lancing into the air.

The bolt of weapon plasma struck the server at half a mile per second. A little ifrit of flame jetted from the impact on the machine; the housing instantly washing over with a rippling corona, dissipating into flashing blue tendrils that licked the air, sputtering, before dying away with an echo of a shriek.

Spindoctor lowered the gun barrel—there was a bloom of carbon scoring on the computer's casing, but nothing more. No obvious damage, and the dull half-light of the shielded screen still shone.

"Surge...protector!" Deming squeaked out, "...It's shielded!"

Daria scowled. Superb. Of course that piece of scrap was up to underwriter standards...

She checked her gun; the charge light beside the slider was pulsing slow, reposed orange.

That had done it. The energy cell was dead. Her glower hardened.

_Death ray my _ass. Damn lousy piece of...she had half a mind to trade the bloody thing in for something better. Like a rock.

She almost didn't notice the Interrogator moving, again, sidewinding over to the blighted machine.

The man swiveled, looming, on his heel towards the blonde, with a beckoning arm. "All right, then. I guess it's my turn. Professor?" He waved his gauntleted fingers inward, and the scientist, albeit with a breath of hesitancy, stepped forward, almost reflexively.

The hand clamped down on Deming's left shoulder; the woman stiffened, petrified.

_"'Yoink.'"_

The man's other hand had snaked up, unnoticed, and he plucked something off the professor's lapel—the little ogive and black curl of wire of her radio mike.

Device in hand, the Interrogator pushed the woman aside, gently, and turned back to the terminal. He knelt, slightly, to plug the wires into what curiously didn't look like a visible port. There was an electric crackle, and the man's helmet nodded. He leaned towards the pickup and quickly recited,

"_Blutbann_, 'In The Grass,' Prep Ranger Solo Two. _Verify_."

There was a sort of "shimmery" noise from the computer, which the officer seemed to take as a good sign...

...as he promptly stood, and snapped the polarizing screen off the monitor with the back of his hand.

Daria swore. "What the Hell are you—" she started, flinging her hand towards her glasses, but cut short.

On the terminal screen was an image of herself...to be precise, of her in that very moment, backlit by one of the lab's wall sconces on the perse bulkhead.

She lowered her arm, the image followed. From the point of view of the monitor frame, it looked like.

Interrogator slid into the station chair, and started pecking at the keyboard. The view changed, flickering to a different shot of the lab, with blocky numerals in the corner of the screen.

Clever, Daria thought, just as the professor piped up.

"You—you have cameras in my labs? My labs?" she said, indignation cresting.

"You assumed we wouldn't?" the masked man drolled, not looking up.

The screen was flashing very quickly. Spindoctor hoped he knew exactly where what she guessed he was looking for...was.

Steady, girl. she thought, rubbing at a tautening neck rope. Don't get antsy...

"Why didn't you do that before?" Deming spat. Speak of the devil...

"Now you're just trying to pick a fight." Interrogator said, calmly. "This is a ROM shell, anyway...the server's still runni—aha."

A new image had appeared onscreen, and the man leaned in towards the juryrigged mike without giving it another glance, and spoke—a ghostly echo of his voice rumbled through the ship a second later;

"Attention all personnel, emergency order. Stop all contact with—"

The last words were mirrored in Daria's mind. "—aw HELL."

He'd looked up at the screen again—really looked this time, seen it.

Seen the throng swarming over the production deck.

It even wasn't a true mob, or a pack—that was plain enough. It was not the movement of grouped beings moving in concert.

The...thing they saw on camera was acting as one organism. Mindless, gestalt flowing and bunching to stimulus. Like a mold, or a carpet of maggots. But these were people.

Were people.

Her people.

In the cluster at the center of the hall, a fusillade of streaking indigo was petering out, gone increasingly wild, and not visibly slowing the mass of bodies that pressed in, before the nucleus of blue figures at the core was overwhelmed, and the light died out.

"What was that?"

"The Viper Detachment." Spindoctor cut the professor off, utterly leaden. "We never canceled the security request..." she nodded, sideways, to the smokey test chamber, without taking her eyes off the monitor, "...they were on their way here."

She could just make out a fuzzy pair of shapes somehow struggling out of the horde, onto clear deck. One was stumbling; slow, and desperate, and did not get far before it was swallowed up again. The other one was faster, in a mad sprint. One of the other shapes on the press machine-blocks saw it, and lunged off in pursuit.

It was a forty foot drop, and the attacker fell far short. It hit the deck, and went still.

Others on the blocks followed it. But there were plenty more waiting.

The Interrogator made a rattley sigh, and slumped forward.

"Well, I guess that's it for backup," he said, drumming his fingers against his mask. "At least we're fairly okay in here."

The _Bifid_'s klaxon sounded just as the first screams tore out of the lab.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

* * *

><p>Author's notes: The original publication used a gruesome little illustration of Wong's drawing, rather than a description. Alas, this couldn't be supported in this format.<p>

For the record, "Slavemaster" is actually a character from the original GI Joe cartoon, I didn't make him up. (In fact, technically, of all the named characters in this story so far, only _one_ is an original character. And he's _named_ after one from the show.)

And, as promised, and if anyone's interested...the official soundtrack playlist is available here: youtube-dot-com/playlist?list=PL8A79E9BF212541FF)!

Still to come, more gore, more cameos!

Daria and associated characters are © MTV networks; GI Joe and associated characters are © Hasbro; all other characters are the property of their respective owners.


	3. Miserable and Stunning

**Chapter 3. "Miserable and Stunning"**

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

...Interrogator shook the last splatter off the tip of his baton, before wiping it passably clean on his coat. The stain blended in well with the others. "How's it coming?"

After a moment, one of the masked techs grunted, pulling himself out of the deck hatchway pried open aside the server housing. It was quite a drop, and a tight fit to boot; Daria didn't envy anyone crawling down _there._

"Hard restart successful, sir..." the tech responded—to be specific, they'd physically pulled the power tap to the Venom Lab's deck, then just stuck it back in. The oldest maintenance procedure in the book, after a simple smacking—"...but we lost at least a day's worth of data—I'm sorry, but there was no way around it."

"That's what backups are for. Don't waste time fretting." Daria quipped, nasally—the stench from the test chamber was getting noticeable...or maybe she was just imagining it. She wasn't sure which would be worse.

That damn klaxon sounded again—it been coming and going, but without any pattern—and _this_ time, it was followed by a faint rumble. _Another_ faint rumble. Enough to shiver the deck under Daria's boots, this time.

She gritted her teeth. "Damnit, I _know_ I felt _that_ one..." There were a few murmured agreements in the lab—not that the confirmation did anything to help her foul mood.

Spindoctor tossed her head at the terminal station. "Do we have commo up, yet?"

"Yessir, attempting now, sir" said the tech at the console. He sounded nervous—completely unreasonably, of course, with the computer's corruption now purged.

Hell, the Interrogator even let him out of the headlock once it had been confirmed onscreen.

The tech pattered away at the keyboard; windows and text flashed up on the monitor, too fast for Daria to bother following.

He shook his head. "Public address and phones are still booting—" tap, tap "Vidcom _is_ working, sir, but only on manual."

"Try the bridge."

"Aye, sir."

The video feed lit up almost at once—probably using the Interrogator's command codes then; the higher ranks' calls traditionally never as much warning as a ring—better to catch people off guard...

Daria blinked. It looked like it was_ their_ turn, this time.

"This is live?"

"Uh...yessir, that's—"

"Venom lab to bridge," Spindoctor cut in, stepping aside the terminal, keying the microphone.

"Uhm, sir, you have to use the—"

"Oh, sure, _now_ you remind me" Picking up the scavenged headset plugged into the monitor, replacing Deming's lapel piece, she held it by one earphone, repeated herself into the mike. Nothing.

"This is Spindoctor to bridge, respond." Pause.

"Cash reward and a full pardon to anyone who responds."

Still nothing. Well, that settled it.

"Where..." there was a gulp, "where did everyone go?" Deming mumbled, around a cigarette, from behind Daria's shoulder.

She said nothing, just scanned the picture again.

The command deck, like most examples of Cobra ergonomics, managed to be both dreary _and_ flashy. The camera now centered on the spot between the two banks of command-and-control stations, studded with glowing screens and buttons in dark metal. The officer-on-watch's stand was betwixt and ahead of them—no one had sprung for a Captain Kirk chair.

Not that anyone was there to enjoy one—the bridge was deserted.

A few odd specks of static traced across the screen, but there was little sign of damage or commotion.

A Cobra-logoed mug had overturned on the Officer on Deck stand, spilling pale-edged _crema_ over a chart. The mug was still steaming, quite visibly.

"Can you switch angles—pan around or something?"

The tech ayesirred again, hit a few more keys.

The screen view began to swivel left, a few degrees a second. Still no signs of life...or the aftermath of it...on the bridge, nor any damage, aside from the strange, flitting static.

There was something about it, though. "Off"...

She'd almost put it together when the damned klaxon went off, again, accompanied this time by a glow of red light in the room onscreen, save for an expanding blue sliver at the edge—the camera had panned over 100° now, and the windscreens were just coming into view, the sky outside still bright enough in the dimming twilight to show—

—_Oh HELL._

Someone screamed _"BRACE!_" It might have been her.

The klaxon blared, but was cut off quickly, drowned out by a titanic moan grinding through the spine of the ship. The deck shuddered, and badly, but didn't pitch—not like Daria had feared. She risked a glance at the monitor again.

Still intact—aside from the spray of snow rushing in through the broken clearview screen, but the _Bifid_ wasn't breaking up on the mountainside.

By force or sheer luck, the ship was visibly clearing the pass it'd plowed towards. The last crags of rock receded from the edges of the window, and out of sight. The grind cut off a few seconds later.

Safe again...or for the moment. But the alpine vista in the dying light, already dim enough to lose any sight of the horizon in the gloom and cloud, didn't look like it promised to be any kinder.

"We're not dead." The Interrogator said, tonelessly.

"No, but we'll be scraping sherpas off the keel for awhile." She shook her head, slightly, with a sigh. "...if we have a keel _left_, anyway."

Not dead, though. Not yet...

"Find me someone out there who's still alive."

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

"...so either someone in the 'island' saw a bad screen by chance, went nuts, and started goin' to town—"

"—or they all just saw what was starting to happen, and bailed out. Like rats."

"That'd be SOP. 'Don't burn up with the machine'—I can't say I'd _blame_ 'em..."

"Yeah, sure. And they hit the silk over the 'roof of the world,' at night, into the snow. And left the boatload of slavering ghouls for us to deal with. Great call for everyone."

_"Sir!"_

Daria peaked back over her shoulder.

"'You find anyone important?" _Maybe someone who can steer this hulk, who_ isn't_ holed up by lunatics?_

"We've made contact with Shutterbug, director, sir."

_So _she_ wasn't dead?_ Daria hadn't dared to hope. If that much had gone right... "Status and location?"

Keys tapped. "Production hall, block...11," the tech answered, "Plate room. She's barracaded in."

Aaand..back up the creek. "patch her through."

_Klack-klick-klack_

The figure that appeared, jaundiced by the pale lights in the lab, dressed somewhere between a _Geographic_ correspondant and a street luger; a blonde wearing a severe 'dutch' braid, the broad beak of an overbite, and a familiar eyeing of smug suspicion cutting up from under a heavy brow.

She'd slung the big CineAlta back on her shoulder to fiddle with a glove...though she'd kept the stupid newsie cap.

Spindoctor learned towards the monitor. "Glad to see you made it, Helga."

Onscreen, Shutterbug's expression seamlessly turned to a "Ya, and what of it, four-eyes?" as she flexed her fingers into her brass knuckles.

"Just sit tight for now, all right? I may need you to sacrifice yourself later." Daria said.

The woman's image blinked, once, very slowly, and raised her gauntlet to an "a-okay" sign with an exaggerated smile...which just as quickly melted into a scowl as the palm dropped down, clutching, to mid chest...

"'Huh,'" the Interrogator piped up. "I didn't know she was Italian..."

Daria rolled her eyes. "Very nice. Spindoctor out."

The collision alarm wailed again, presently. But this time the hammering that followed, if lacking the violence of earlier blows, was far more unsettling; it had come sheer laterally, from the starboard.

Daria found her head starting to swim; the _Bifid'_s deck had settled back to a noticeable bowward list.

"Maybe we clipped a rotor." Daria said, wincing. Maybe it wouldn't be an issue until _after_ they made a nice snowy crash into Everest. _Yeah, that's the ticket. Keep thinking positive._

Like, maybe, if they couldn't find someone to get them _out_ of the besieged inner keep, they could hope the rest of the ship would act like a gigantic crumple zo—

The phone rang.

It brought everything to a weird stop. The phone, the actual corded old thing wall-mounted on the bulkhead behind a workstation.

The console tech stood, peered at the label over the flashing red extension light. "'Says 'magazine,' sir."

She was puzzled a moment...then Daria's eyes lit up.

"Funny, there shouldn't even _be_ anyone from—"

Spindoctor brushed him aside. "It's not. Get back on the cameras." She paused, after picking up the receiver, "—if it's not under 'magazine,' check the listing for the 'paper warehouse.'" She pressed the phone to her ear. "Ahoy."

Another pause, then she nodded. "Glad to hear you guys made it."

"Image feed up, sir."

Daria sidled over to the terminal, looking for herself.

The picture was the washed out monochrome of near-infrared. It was dark in the cavernous chamber; the ship's former ordnance storage department was deeply buried in the bowels of the armored keep, and at the lowest level of the freight elevator.

There was a good handful of figures on the screen. Ink Vipers, eyes twinkling like cats at the camera. One of them had a phone.

"...a little surprised, though, that this is the first we're hearing from you...something important enough going on down there to keep you out of the loop?"

The Viper with the phone hemmed, visibly, as Daria listened. Daria glanced to Deming, pointedly, to clarify.

The woman looked a bit uncomfortable. "Well, ahm, sir, we—there's been a few—"

"Makeout spot. Got it." Spindoctor said, flatly. "Anyone got a gat down there?"

She paused, frowned. "A _gun_, Viper. Is anyone armed? Personal construction equipment, even?"

She waited for the reply—and sighed, grumbling. Shoulders slumped.

Interrogator buzzed, "That bad?"

"Not if you like trying to kill people with a forklift."

_Olé,_ she thought. Better than nothing—maybe they could use one for an "end run." _Not much protection for a passenger, though_...maybe they could use some cargo as a mantlet. Like on of those reams of blank—

It all fell into place.

_Got it._ She said as much, out loud.

"Start loading backups on the elevator—crossways to the keel, top heavy stacks, as _close_ to the front of the platform as it can lift."

She listened to the reply from the magazine...and smiled. "That's almost _exactly_ the idea. Only need it _once_, though—don't let it start until I give the word." She dropped the phone to the surprised tech at his terminal.

"So is _anyone_ in the lab still standing, Interrogator?"

"You _wound_ me—there are _enough_ left..."

"My most abashed apologies. Now I need someone run down to the Tiger Cages—" she pointed past the dark of the test chamber, towards the inner door "—see if you can scrounge up a couple of things..."

The klaxon had started up again. "...and don't hurry or anything."

She kept moving, mentally, letting the details flow, working out the implementations. It helped keep things clear, steady her nerves. The plan of action, the roles to play in it.

And very quietly, it was keeping her from having to think about _what_ she was having to plan.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

It took twenty minutes, maybe two or three altogether putting it together, the rest of it just getting the pieces of the scheme in place. Getting people in position. Waiting.

There had been four more collisions. Nothing catastrophic, yet, but during the last couple, the interior lights had started flickering. A small malfunction, sure, but to start up on a rugged old battle wagon like the _Bifid_, not a good sign...

The band assembled on the deck outside the Venom Lab entrance...eleven, standing, and twice that many on freight platform approaching up the lift shaft.

Maybe four actual guns between them. And thirty-to-one numbers against. With a deadline.

One of the remaining guards was talking. Openly, if barely above a mutter. "Hey...anyone see that old movie...wit' the meteor that crashes into the airliner, makes all these dead guys on board come back to life and start—"

She cut her eyes at the man, sharply, over her epaulettes. "Unless it suggests a new battle strategy _and_ has one _hell_ of a happy ending, I don't want to hear about it."

The man shrank. "Uh...never mind."

There was a little pause before a different voice piped up, softly. "Why would there be a bunch of dead guys on an airliner?"

Daria's teeth ground. "Shutterbug, status."

The radio headset squealed. Audio feedback and some brassy _thwak_ sounds not quite overlaying the chilling background cacophony.

The agent's voice dripped back in. _"Oh, just _aces_ here, boss. The 'Sheena' act's really packing 'em in. Hold on_—" there were a few more _thwaks_, and a pained howl. "..._f I end up losing this finger, I'm going to take it outta someone's face_!"

"Just stick to the plan. You're no good to us as a casualty."

"_Got a real funny way o' showing it, sister..."_ there was a distinct crunch, and some marginally human shrieks. "..._ste it and _like_ it you rat f-_"

Spindoctor let the grisly audio play for a few more seconds, then lowered the speaker below head level.

"Now that you've heard that," she addressed her little troupe, "let's talk about conservation of heroism for this op."

There were murmurs as she straightened her glasses.

"We need to get people to the bridge who can puzzle out the conn well enough to fly us to safety. That's the only way of getting off this bird alive. I checked." That part was probably _mostly_ true—no sense encouraging anyone to run off to double check for themselves... "That means if anything happens to one of _them_, you try and save them...and _only_ them. Anyone else gets dropped. There's just no time."

She caught a couple of worried glances exchanged as she watched faces, but to her surprise, not that many.

Many or most were taking it rather well...probably, as she thought, sadly, because it was a better deal than most snakes _usually_ got...

Behind her, the moan of the elevator crested, then cut out with a bang as the platform reached the lab deck.

The _motors_ stopped, anyways. The eerie groan of straining metal continued. Shifting, and never quite dying out.

An Ink Viper stepped off the platform, staring at his watch. "Thirty-eight seconds, sir. Timed like you asked...should be the same going down."

The alarm started to go off again as she nodded—it wasn't enough warning, this time.

The blow to the ship was faster, briefer, but more violent than any preceding—a swift kick more than a hammer blow. The lights flashed, and Daria nearly stumbled.

The sound of tortured steel bayed from the elevator platform. Buried in the noise, Daria heart a sharp _ring_—metal sheering off.

Maybe something small. But that wouldn't last, though. She was sure.

She looked over her crew again. Quiet, now, now, and mostly face masked. But she could see the eyes...

_No time._ She pulled on a glower. "Cobras, we take this on _our_ terms._ Into positions_."

But, as much as it would have helped, she couldn't do it...she just couldn't give the battle cry.

Boots had started scraping across the deck, and Spindoctor took her place in formation.

She stopped in the center of the platform. A score of maniacs in front of her, a scanty rearguard behind, mostly scientists and printer's devils at her flanks, and below her, ten storeys down and a thousand strong...

"I...don't suppose you could give the rest of us some last minute pointers on skull-cracking?" she asked.

"It's really not the kind of thing you can teach." Interrogator replied, apologetically.

Naturally.

She motioned to the hooded goon at the control keypad. "Down, please. Lobby."

She went back to the radio, just as the machinery started up again. The platform was moving; her stomach dipped.

"Helga, we're rolling out. You've got thirty seconds."

She raised her voice. "_Get ready."_

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

_"Ten seconds"_

Helga kicked back off the side of Block 11, smacking at a few ghouls who'd managed to get too close with her free hand before she swung out, completely out of reach.

She'd given almost enough spare 'oomf' to the chain for it's lsat pendulum swing across the aisle—it should be her last trip over the shambling mob. _Or so's the plan._

Practically the whole lot had grouped beneath her on the walkway between the last pair of press blocks that flanked the deck. She tucked up her boots ahead of the grasping wave of claws. _Some plan!_

She'd had enough of this. So had her fists—her free hand was going numb. What was left of it, anyway.

_"Eight seconds"_

She pivoted midswing, jackknifed at the hips, legs out and straight ahead—as her boots reached metal she started running. Sideways, weight and momentum suspended on the ceiling cargo chain.

_"Six seconds"_

...closing on the rear edge of the block, she found as much purchase she her soles could, and made a final long-legged push—a horizontal _leap _sailing back over the gap towards the rear of the hall.

There was screaming clatter below her. The mob was shoving in pursuit...

_"Three seconds..."_

The upper threshold approached...and slowing. She'd misjudged the aim. Just. _Cripes..._

No time. She let go of the chain before the swing slowed completely. Made her best jump. _Too high up, too far, too __fast__...damni..._ The howling was coming down the hall quickly, at her heels...

Her right hand fingers brushed metal, barely feeling the pressure. She clutched for a hold as she swung her good arm forward. Her bad hand daubing red as it slid, down, and she felt the bones in her palm—

Shutterbug's nose grazed the lip of the frame over the big door, an instant before her hands reached it.

The shock wrenched her shoulder, but she'd stopped.

_"Two seconds...one..."_

She checked the way she'd come; most of the insensate pack was still walled between the press blocks she'd been swinging between from the hoist for the past five minutes. The rearmost edge—the one facing her, now—had fallen, spilled over. The freaks had fallen over each other trying to get to their bait.

A nice, tight grouping. Beneath her, she felt the blast doors rumbling open.

Someone sounded the battle cry.

The tired smirk widened. _Criminey. Some _plan!

Below, there was a ripple of sharp _snaps_ as the last cargo straps broke. Metal creaked.

...and eighty thousand pounds of reeled cotton rag spilled out.

The list of the deck might have helped, but the momentum of the sheer bulk of the one ton spools was more than enough.

Helga tucked her legs up instinctively as the avalanche tumbled out—the cargo doorway was tall, and the spools were stacked high...some of them, she saw, were bouncing surprisingly high.

High, fast, and downrange—towards the shrieking mob still clambering over each other.

Forget hammer and anvil—this was a hammer hitting a hammer.

The thundering drumroll was overpowering—drowned out all the other noise of the hall.

Even the shrieking...Helga barely noticed when it cut off, abruptly, mostly because it was accompanied by a sudden, very brief muffling of the hellish thundering...

She glanced up, to see for herself. And winced.

Efficient.

But..._damn!_ Not all-encompassing. Nothing much had survived the...smear between the press blocks, but that hadn't been all of them.

The rest—more 'territorial,' or just slower, maybe—were still scattered across the hall and the machines.

Sure as hell coming out of the woodwork _now,_ weren't they...

Her grip on the ledge started to slip, a little. Cold sweat did that.

But there was a renewed yell from the elevator. A new rumbling started up. _Phase two, Shaka?_ She held on just long enough, puffing a hair ribbon out of her eyes, till the expected forms rolled into the threshold beneath her, at the edge of her vision, framed by a harsh sparkle and an arcing clatter from the deck plates.

Just long enough to place her mark...and she let go.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

**_"COBRAAA!"_**

Slave Master himself caught Shutterbug mid-whoop, in a twirl, setting her down on the new "train" dragged behind the formation's shields...

High-weight cotton rag. Pushed, five abreast, in rolls spooling almost two miles of the stuff. Thick, practically clothlike...

The living Maruta keepers craned into the narrow gaps between the files, skipping the megafauna-something-or-other prods over the advancing deck one handed.

...and very non-conductive.

The prow of the formation reached the slick spot between the first pair of machines. They met the first picket of the screamers. Charging, berserk.

They were swamped by the front of electrified flooring. Their noise ended, or shifted pitch in shuddery pain.

The group was picking up speed. Some of the gibbering wrecks driven before them, some just bypassed. The rest they just plowed through.

Daria, behind the center roll, saw it jolt, hopping in course a few inches, then settle down.

Her path went bumpy for a spell. Dust shaking off the roll got into her nostrils. Crisp, with a rotten-egg after vapor.

The splotch on the roll got smaller over the revolutions, like a tumbler of a slot machine.

She heard shooting to her side—the few armed guards were leapfrogging on the tail of advance.

There were really too few to—_not now._ No time for it...

The ozone was building up, mixed with wisps of smoke. She dragged her breaths down, raggedly. Not even daring to cough.

They were running the gauntlet at a "seven minute mile," and she was making it on adrenaline. She needed every 'edge' she could muster...

A volley of fire streaked overhead, singing. A pulse hit a form Daria hadn't seen, looming off an approaching block. The shot caught the thing only as it leapt, and it flopped, burning on the bare lane between the rolls next to Spindoctor. _Too close._

Her boot brushed against the poor thing's smoldering hide. Too _close_.

She pushed it out of her mind, 'checked the markings of the row the group was passing. The same machine block the jumped had—

_Block six!_ Halfway down the hall, already? Maybe another forty seconds...

She missed it, when it came. So did everyone else—it must have been lying in wait, perhaps retaining some shred of intellect. She would kick herself later, but at the time—

She barely heard the screaming, but the feral bay brought her eyes front...face to face with the raw-fleshed maw of a thrashing hulk clambering over the top of the rolling drum ahead of her. Her heart skipped; part of her mind was babbling about how It must have vaulted from the deck, and the thing had bashed away the Ink Vipers pushing the roll. The men fell, though the reel kept turning. Nothing could have stopped it fast, but if it started slowing...

The thing on top was already getting a better footing, not merely keeping pace, but making forward progress.

Unthinking, Spindoctor closed the distance in a bound, and shouldered into the roll like a juggernaut. Harder than she'd thought; the impact was almost numbed, nerves stunned.

The jolt of new speed threw the attacker off balance, and it scrambled to find purchase from being dragged under.

A second swipe past Daria's face caught hard, inches above her eyes. The claw around her hair brought a needle stab of pain from her skin, spurring an involuntary burst of fury. She shoved harder.

The grip tightened, if anything. She felt a fast damp growing at the roots of her hairline.

She could've sworn she heard someone bellow her _name_—and a close, faint fibery tearing she could hear echoing to the base of her jaw, backed by the thundering approach of heavy bootsteps, and the sudden clangour of coiled metal...

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

The tissues of the human head and scalp bleed very readily; Daria had been reminded of that back in Driver's Ed, a decade before, during a classically disquieting film strip.

Biologically, it was not surprising. The brain consumed a lion's share of the body's resources to begin with, heartily gorged on the body's blood supply, but with the unfortunate side effect that a localized infection could spread quickly and badly to the delicate gray matter. .

But like any good cub scout knew, there was an easy, natural mechanism to clean out an injury; let the blood itself flush out the flush wounds out of germs and dirt, the sources of infection as naturally deadly as an injury itself.

In short, and simply put, blood flows freely to protect the brain.

It makes an impression...

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

_Dec 30th, 2009. _

"..._for conspicuous and audacious merit"_

The inscription on the back of Spindoctor's Silver Serpent of Valor was mirrored in a later line of the medal citation itself, kept in the lid of the snakewood box, next to a print taken from the dock security video after the crippled _Bifid_ put into port at the Nepal dig.

The mob of survivors descending the cargo ramp was hardly parade quality—almost all of them, coming off the line, had been dirtied with ink or grease to begin with, but a good number had been splattered with deepening red...but none more than Daria herself, though the bright shock of scarlet than had flown over half her scowling face like a devillock was all her own.

The color and contrast of the picture had been adjusted, to boot, to enhance picture quality, when it had been submitted with the report. It had the unexpected side effect of making the blood lacquered on the crew blaze like embers in the dark.

Daria smiled, thinly. The photo belonged on the cover of a Bob Howard novel. _Heh._ And she'd told her own mother that she'd gotten her hair caught in a fax machine accident at "The Office"...

She ran a bare finger over the main contents of the case, stopping where the dulled metal connected to the patina scaled inlaid wood of the grip.

Gently, she pried the trophy out of it's velvet depression, hefting it one-handed. It was heavy, but it fit into her palm like a glove.

The designer, an uncharming fellow in MARS' employ named Scrap Iron, called it the "Gorgon." Something inspired by the cylinder design—it was, he's vaingloriously proclaimed at Daria's promotion ceremony, the pinnacle of revolver development.

It had sure as Hell taken her by surprise, almost more than the promotion to full "bird" subcommander.

For all that the head of Cobra Intelligence, Spindoctor's nominal boss, had ranted and torn _her_ hair out over the _Bifid_ disaster, it seemed that Destro had _really_ liked getting that ship back.

Always a marvel how the coils of power knotted themselves...

In the office's solitude, she broke a small rule of safety and slipped a finger under the guard, over the duel trigger setup.

Teflon coated, multi-caliber "universal" cylinder, automatic action—_Agatha Christie, you is vindicated_—gas-sealed...

She popped the lower reload lever, and swiveled open the stumpy barrel mounted under the main, exposing the base of the "little" 20-gauge Tungsten quadrangle shell.

She shook her head. She'd had to look up half the features on the new gun. All she'd done was put a request in to the armory for a better anti-equipment weapon. She hadn't expected something she'd have to read an encyclopedia to comprehend.

A _lot_ of things had gone over people's heads in this case, though...that was Destro's death-mask MARS insignia on the butt—Hell, the _pommel_—of the Gorgon, not a Cobra quartermaster mark.

Well. Always good to know who's favor you've managed to curry. There was an old adage that percolated through the ranks of Cobra: "No friends—only convenient alliances."

She straightened her arm, checking the tritium sights. Very convenient.

Presently, there was a basso purr from her workstation. New mail—pretty good time, if it was what she was waiting for. Good time, or a _really_ depressingly simple reply.

She clicked up the BIOK client again—having to enter a password or three this time. Automatic Security Protocols. _Jackpot._

The new message was the reply from her intended. She opened it, entered her portion of a cypher key, and saw the wall of gibberish onscreen quickly flitter into text...

**To**:** Spindoctor**

**From: CrystalBall**

**Sastimos,**

**I have received your data outline, and acted accordingly.**

**The craft of metaprobability analysis is still very young, and as such is unquietingly more Cassandra and Pythia, but as much as anything is written in the stars (_rf. _"Narrative Causality"), the clean odds for your scenario are as follows:**

**•8.81% Serendipidous encounter of undeployed OPFOR elements (1-4), leading to cover exposure (79% contingent)**

**•10 ± 1% SIGINT leakage leading to OPFOR investigation, leading to 50±30% cover exposure.**

**•9±2% Serendipidous encounter by civilian noncombatants (1-3; gaussian peak of age range 11-19), leading to 60% successful apprehension or termination of incursors, leading to 30% successful escape or evasion of captives, and 77% triggering of outside investigation and loss of cover (in all cases).**

**•21±16.7% Mission failure due to internal misadventure, malfeasance, equipment failure, etc (contingent on deployed assets)...**

There were a couple of others—relatively low probability complications that tended to compound into likelyhood for these kinds of ops...nothing astonishing, but good to have actual numbers on.

What was next, though...

** However, I'm afraid there was something strange in the results. A family of anomalous contingencies kept appearing in the runs; I assumed problems with input factors or initial settings but there was nothing to be debugged or removed without breaking the setup.**

**I thought there was a ring of something to it. Might be. Distilling the anomalies back into something I could work back to brought up something solid, but vaguer than I like, or can puzzle out. **

**Data follows. I might do better with more information, though I know you don't hold out. Maybe you can make better sence of it, but the whole thing feels unclean. Good journey.**

**39 ± 29 % odds, [compound] that...**

Daria stared at the screen a minute, blinked, re-read. She got it. It all started clicking.

She kept her eyes on the screen, but had stopped seeing it.

Spindoctor swore once out loud, paused, then repeated it. _Had to happen sooner or lat..._she kept herself from slamming her first into her armrest—or the screen—with what was honestly lessening difficulty. Her feelings didn't leave; but they went cold very rapidly.

She let them congeal for a minute while she got her thoughts together. It didn't take long; Spindoctor's fine brain never really stopped. Part of it had started murmuring about possibilities before she'd finished reading the message...

Daria unclenched her fist, digging the fingernails out of her palm, and snatched up the telephone headset. The blue LED flicked on under her thumbnail as she got it to her ear. Idly, a voice in the back of her head mused about how she must be starting to look like her moth—

The voice on the line answered. "Fred," said Daria, "get ahold of Overkill for me." She listened, then grimaced. "Ah, no. The other one. The first one."

While she was waiting on Fred, she popped on a Misfits/Stingers "_Best Of"_ compilation on her computer. She leaned back in her chair, as the music welled up. The art display on the wall was fading from _Nighthawks_ to Repin's _Ivan the Terrible._ She picked up the gun again, opened the cylinder, ejected the 9mm rounds already loaded, and pulled out the "special" replacements in the snakewood case.

A voice burbled on Spindoctor's headset. "Overkill," she nodded, absently. Slowly, carefully, she'd started loading the replacements into her weapon. "I have a proposition for you..."

The long cased Remington Maximums slipped readily into the waiting cylinder.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Author's notes: Starviper's "Silver Serpent of Valor" mentioned above, there. Plus one or two more horrible crossover character references. Anyone spot 'em? :)

Another funny thing—when I originally started planning this story, although all the dates are the same, it was set a year or so in the _future_. The schedule slipped so much that I actually ended up writing a section of the above _on_ the exact date when events were supposed to be taking place, at about the same _hour_, too. That was an...unusual feeling, I have to say.

Daria and associated characters are © MTV networks; GI Joe and associated characters are © Hasbro; all other characters are the property of their respective owners.


	4. In the Ring

**Chapter 4. "In the Ring"**

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

_December 31, 2009, 12:38 AM_

_Southern Colorado_

Daria's ears hurt.

They'd popped maybe ten times in the last half hour as the flight mowed it's way through the snowy dark. A natural result of altitude changes—the transport helicopter's hold wasn't pressurized.

_And barely heated._ She thought, mirthlessly, brushing off another urge to rub the spots where her eyeglass arms hung onto her skull, like lead. She should have worn her Ushanka. Non-regulation or not, she probably could have gotten away with wearing the motheaten old fur cap.

Probably fit in with some of the present company, though, she mused, making another study of her map—

"…I can't _believe_ they kept this…!" droned a voice across the crew cabin, again, politely quiet enough to be heard over the engines.

Daria peaked up, over the edge of her map. A bald, corpulent looking Psycho was their "Sludge-Viper" mission specialist—command had pulled him out of reserve. There weren't that many of his comrades left, let along still active in the organization.

The man looked pallid green, even in the red night-lighting as he flexed an arm into his uniform—the limb moving with the characteristic numb deadness of a prosthetic. It matched to the side of his head glinting with metal in place of bare flesh. It made her skin crawl just to look at the man.

The figure sitting _next_ to the grumbling Viper, however, just made her feel the night's chill more.

_His_ getup, though comparably sparse next to the flash and spangle of most minions' outfits, practically gleamed under the cabin light; most of the few shadowy spots being the odd peppery streaks that ran through the feral-looking fur trim of his jacket.

He still wore a padded hood, but this one had pulled up the concealing mask—exposing a face that looked like it had been turned on a lathe.

There were ten more like him, on her chopper alone, and the same number on the flight's wingman.

_Snow Serpents._ Cobra's home-grown arctic special warfare troops formed the backbone of the team.

_Heh._ Spindoctor thought, stifling a smirk. '_Homegrown_'—she knew for a fact that most of the crop had been recruited from outside the organization. They might have been the 'best of the best,' but they'd cut their teeth _fighting_ Cobra...

As the Sludge-Viper continued another grouse, one of them, still masked, and two seats further forward, leaned out in the aide—rudely in front of the blank faceplated platoon sniper, another codenamed agent who's name Spindoctor didn't know—and called out a half-intelligble phrase or two, with a mirthful tone and a lolling nod aft.

She only caught a word or two. But it made her ears prickle.

It must have showed. The man across the aisle had started to reply, but his eye had flickered, catching her face in his periphery. The life instantly drained out of his face.

Cautiously, the officer turned to face Daria, leaning forward to speak. _"Vy...govorite po-russki?"_

"_Nemnogo_," she lied. "I think my accent's a disgrace, though, captain. Just frightening."

She didn't actually look to be sure, but she heard the low chatter from the other Serpents dwindle out to nothing.

Spindoctor bit down on a lean smile.

The Snow Serpent captain—"Dragonsky," according to her mission file, which she was _sure_ was his real name—nodded, very slowly. The man was _much_ older than she was, and Daria was feeling every year of it now, under the appraising gleam of those gimlet eyes.

_Damnit_. She'd gotten herself good and preoccupied with her own preparations, but she was starting to realize she'd _severely_ neglected acclimating herself some of the human elements of her command. Old mistake to make…stupid, _kid_ movie.

She was kicking herself for it, now. She hoped—_damn well sure_—it wasn't the oversight that'd come back to bite her.

Spindoctor pulled on a casual face, and turned back to her map, tracing a finger along a county road line she'd already committed to memory.

"You seem _guarded_, Captain…anything on your mind?" She asked, pleasantly, not looking up. "Something red flagging the plans?

"_Yeeah_, I dunno, what if like someone tries something mar—_UMPH!"—_the Joisey-flavored snark from the fractious Sludge-Viper cut off abruptly.

Dragonsky slyly pulled his rifle stock back across his lap, and gave a snare-tight shrug.

"Well," he said, with a hum of an accent, "_you_ bring it up, ma'am,"—_well_ now _she felt as old as him_—"so I'll speak it. I—ah, _all_ of us get uneasy with a lot of brass in the field. It gets sticky."

She felt a glare coming on. "'You expecting a problem, captain?"

The man's face got grimmer. "Orders are that you command the mission, ma'am, but _I _command the troops…" Another half-shrug. "…or so. But there _have_ been troubles, I've seen, with non-combat officers deciding to charge into fights. People get very zealously killed. Ma'am."

Spindoctor rationed out a small pause, not breaking eye contact. "Well then, I don't foresee any problems, captain…after all, this is not a combat mission. This is search and recovery. And I don't want to bring 'office politics' into this either, if I don't have to…"

She broke into a rare grin—a little short of jack o'lantern wide, and friendly as a knife edge. It made her cheeks hurt. "I mean, we're all on the same side, now, aren't we, captain?"

The man didn't even blink. And he sure as Hell didn't look angry. A whisper of a smirk grew across the old soldier's face.

"Now? No…" he raised a pointer finger. "…_always_ the same side. The only side I ever—"

The alert chime cut him off—the prearranged brevity signal from the cockpit. _About time._

"…and there he is." Dragonsky finished, chuckling. He yanked down his face mask one-handed, and rose. "Men, LZ in one minute—prepare to deploy!"

A low bustle erupted in the cabin again, all else pushed aside. Someone killed the CD player.

Daria herself didn't have much to do at this point—comparatively, at least—but she got down to business. She got the map refolded and tucked back in her coat, rechecked her own sparse gear, stopped herself from unbuckling her seatbelt—no way she'd keep her footing. The pitch of the transport was already climbing steeply for landing...

Her ears popped again.

"Cobra Commander isn't paying you seventeen cents a _minute_ to gad about!" Dragonsky was barking, at his troops_. "Move!" _

Daria's head was swimming a little—damn odd angles, no damned windows, in the DAR—she caught herself. Maniac helicopter or not, it was no excuse to let the stress ride back in.

She tried to distract herself. Checking the bulge at her right hip—

_BUMP_. The chopper stumbled to a halt, leveling out forwards. There was the oddest, sinking sensation for a moment. Maybe it was the snow.

One of the Snow Serpents must have been taken by surprise, too—someone bleated out a startled "_Blya!"_

_"English only!"_ snapped another voice, apparently automatically.

Daria tried to ignore the laughter that followed the surprised pause—the landing was no small relief, but it brought little time to relax.

"Doors open—get the rig out. _Move!"_

_Now_ Daria unbelted, and stood, pressing herself back against the bulkhead while the other Cobras set up the big snow mobile strapped into the center aisle.

She tugged down the front of her duffel coat, self-consciously, though it proved unnecessary—it easily covered the butt of the pistol jutting from her belt. She'd ended up having to mount the big revolver holster backwards to practically draw it—which was a legitimate technique, but one she feared would look like an affectation. _Or Bill-freakin'-Hickok…_

A chill air whipped across her cheek, icing her nostrils. Someone had cracked the doors, including the huge clamshells that opened to the rear cargo ramp. That was her cue...

She edged over to the "Polar Blast"—_groan_—and plopped down in a rear seat, next to the (thankfully unloaded) missile launcher. All else aside, she was thankful that she warranted a ride. She'd never have kept up on snowshoes.

Over her shoulder, the Sniper-Viper slid down his lane of the aisle, past the still-gasping Sludge-Viper towards the rear door. She started to wonder why he still had his rifle slung over his shoulder…before she realized it wasn't. The big Steyr knockoff was locked in an armature over the fellow's scapula. He ducked the barrel down under the door threshold, hunching for headroom, then let it go. The weapon bobbed, steadily, dampened against the man's footfalls, and very slyly mirroring the bearings of the man's head.

Daria just pulled her coat hood up, over her hair, and cinched it down tight. _Bedlam_.

Once the screening troops had moved up, her driver started the Polar Blast's engine, revving up with a whine.

The snowmobile skidded down the rear ramp, front skis meeting the snow with a jolt. Daria winced, instinctively, tucking her head low. The muffled wash from the transport's rotors buffeted the edge of her hood, kicking up ice specks against he glasses. She tugged the hood down a little tighter.

The 'Blast curled into a hard right turn around t the chopper's port side, close enough to reach out and touch the raised hatching of the garish "Python" livery. The other men were silently disgorging from the forward side door—half, anyway, that Spindoctor could see. The other would be filing out on the other side. Less chance of getting the entire chalk gutted if there was an amb…

She quickly diverted her attention farther forward, squinting. She could make out the other helicopter some yards ahead—the dull moonglow through the low clouds almost obligated any need for night vision.

The snakes ahead had moved out in admirable sync with her own group—_damned fine discipline._ Almost eerie.

—suddenly, an unseen figure loomed up from the ground at her right, twinned at once by a figure far ahead, as one of the first chopper's Blasts' passed by.

Silently, the figure mounted astride Daria's vehicle, snow dusting off the wolfskin cloak on his pack, and taken his designated seat, SAW leveled forward. Her alarm scarcely diminished. _"Almost" nothin'._

The first radio gabber started up shortly—the voice was courteous enough to keep it to a throaty whisper_. Good man—it wouldn't do to make Jerry's hydrophone operators' jobs any easier—_

Spindoctor checked herself from the inner tirade. _Steady girl…_not that she needed to worry about missing important information from the net—DZ such-and-such hared at heading so-and-so, estimated…everything perfectly on schedule, according to the plan. Etcetera…

There was a flush of downwash as the helicopters lifted off, yawing low overhead. Daria didn't watch them go.

_Everything by the numbers…_the thought gave only a grim-tinged comfort…_now it's all just waiting._

Just waiting…

Behind her, the whisper of roots dwindled into the distance, and soon died away completely.

On the ground, the engines of the four snowmobiles droned easily, as they kept pace with "Operation Loving Olga"'s platoon, slogging through the mountain snow.

There was just enough breeze to be noticed, but it added little to the gnawing cold, and nothing at all to dispel the clouds overhead.

Spindoctor checked her watch. Sunup in…six hours, about.

Mostly waiting, till then. Just waiting...

Unnoticed and unseen, her command trudged ahead, disappearing into the darkness.

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Author's notes: For the record, by now, I've fully recognized that naming this story "Expectavi" was kinda jinxing it.

The unnamed Sludge-Viper is yet _another_ crossover cameo. (I couldn't resist. :) )

And, as always, comments and reviews are welcome. Criticism too, as long as it's at least more politely worded than "_You suck, and you should kill yourself with a highway flare!_" (It should be "_please_ kill yourself with a highway flare," thankyouverymuch.)


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